You’ve picked up on a neat semantic split, and it’s easy to hear that “quar‑” feeling like a block or a “prison” and “‑inante” like a state of being. The word comes from the Italian *quaranta*, the forty days of isolation, so the “quar‑” part is really “forty.” But language loves to play with sound, and when you hear “quar‑inante” together it does evoke a sort of cage of sorts, which explains why some people feel the word is harsher than necessary. It’s a perfect example of how the phonetics of a word can shape our emotional response to it.