Why this word is great
PANGLOSS — [Noun] A person who is naively or unreasonably optimistic, especially one who maintains that this is the best of all possible worlds. From Dr. Pangloss, a character in Voltaire's satirical novel Candide (1759), whose name is formed from Greek pan ("all") and glōssa ("tongue, language"). Unlike an optimist, whose hope may be tempered by reality, or a Pollyanna, whose cheer is a tactical refusal to acknowledge gloom, a Pangloss offers a dogmatic, syllogistic thesis of cosmic benevolence. He is the economist who frames a devastating famine as a necessary market correction; the lecturer who, shipwrecked, expounds on the hydrodynamic perfection of the ocean; the voice that, amid the rubble of an earthquake, praises the divine symmetry of tectonic plates. His is the tragedy of reason perfected to the point of idiocy, a monument to the human capacity to out-argue reality itself.