Entry: sinecure (n.)
In context: "...she's thanked C.T. effusively on more than one public occasion for leaving the plush sinecure of Throppinghamshire and coming down to undertake the stress-ridden tasks not only of bureaucratic administration and insuring as smooth a transition as possible..."
Definition: An ecclesiastical benefice without cure of souls.
Other: Here Wikipedia is more helpful:
A sinecure (from Latin sine = "without" and cura = "care") means an office that requires or involves little or no responsibility, labour, or active service. The term originated in the medieval church, where it signified a post without any responsibility for the "cure of souls", the regular liturgical and pastoral functions of a cleric, but came to be applied to any post, secular or ecclesiastical, that involved little or no actual work. Sinecures have historically provided a potent tool for governments or monarchs to distribute patronage, while recipients are able to store up titles and easy salaries.
SNOOT score: 3
Page:288
Source: Oxford English Dictionary, Wikipedia
Definitive Jest is a vocabulary-building and SNOOT-approved word-of-the-day blog centered around David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
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