Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
ARROGATE
People seem unable to keep their hands off things that are not properly theirs. Sometimes they steal or plagiarize; sometimes they just arrogate.
To arrogate (pronounced AIR-uh-gate) is to claim something you are not entitled to, to appropriate, to make undue claims of possession. Sometimes it can mean to claim something on behalf of another party.
Arrogation is often understood in an abstract rather than a concrete sense. We have all known the minor satraps and functionaries who take advantage of circumstances to arrogate to themselves an authority to which they are not entitled.
English appropriated the word from the Latin arrogare, "to appropriate to oneself," from ad, "to" or "toward," plus rogare, "to ask."
Arrogant grows from the same root.
Example: From "Is there a doctrine in the house?" by Jack Hitt in Harper's, January 1994: "Who defines a nation's interest? My problem with foreign-policy realists is that they arrogate to themselves the ability to divine the nation's true interests."