nescient
/ˈnɛsɪənt
/adjective literary
Lacking knowledge; ignorant: I ventured into the new Korean restaurant with some equally nescient companions...
- Echoing Goethe's Romantic interpretation and adulation, Belinsky's Bard ‘understood heaven, earth, and hell’ but was, nonetheless, an ‘ignoramus’, nescient of the meaning of his own plays.
- This means I can get whipped up into a state of ill-informed indignation, because if I'm going to get indignant it may as well be in quite a pompous and nescient fashion.
- The cluelessness in his expression's so nescient that it's something close to profound.
Derivatives
nescience
/ noun ...- It reminds me somewhat of the collusion between cynicism and innocence, in which nescience is the very form that jaded dyspepsia takes.
- Past, future, and present, these three times are imperceptible, an ignorance or nescience that is not real, only false.
- This is not to deny Lutyens his aesthetic preferences, but it is to point out that preferences cannot legitimize or wipe out a record of nescience and disdain, and of taking the credit without taking any of the blame.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Latin nescient- 'not knowing', from the verb nescire, from ne- 'not' + scire 'know'.