Monday, September 8, 2008

cosmopolite

cosmopolite \koz-MOP-uh-lyt\, noun:

1. One who is at home in every place; a citizen of the world; a cosmopolitan person.
2. (Ecology) An organism found in most parts of the world.

At first, Audubon made comparatively little impression in America, but he was an immediate success in Britain, where he presented himself alternately as a rustic backwoodsman and a sophisticated cosmopolite.
-- Alan Fern, "A Great Original's Great Originals", New York Times, December 12, 1993
He was a big-city sophisticate and moved easily in international film circles but, like his exact contemporary, the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima (also a globetrotting cosmopolite), Pasolini rejected the glossy consumer culture that had made him famous in favor of the standards of an earlier, more rigid and more traditional society.
-- Edmund White, "Movies and Poems", New York Times, June 27, 1982
Behind the professional caution is a figure of storied warmth and charm, an American-educated cosmopolite as comfortable in the Midwest as in the Middle East.
-- Paula Span, "Man of Many Worlds", Washington Post, February 28, 1998

Cosmopolite comes from Greek kosmopolites, from kosmos, "world" + polites, "citizen," from polis, "city."

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