If you actually look up the word hubris when you encounter it, you are demonstrating a quality that is the precise opposite of hubris, which means “exaggerated pride or self-confidence.”

Being curious naturally leads to learning, and it also requires enough awareness to acknowledge what we don’t know. Hubris is often used when someone’s excessive confidence leads to an error—when things don’t go their way because they didn’t pay attention to some important detail. Hubris is more than just a failure, it’s a failure that is the result of this specific kind of mistake.

 

The first uses of sanguine in English had to do with the color red and what that color is frequently associated with: blood. In the Middle Ages, when sanguine entered English from French, it was one of the “four humors” that described a person’s temperament; a sanguine person had the ruddy (reddish) complexion of a healthy, active, and optimistic person.

Today, sanguine means “confident and hopeful,” as in “they are sanguine about the company’s future” or “she has a sanguine disposition.”