• ineluctable •
Printable Version Pronunciation: in-ê-lêk-tê-bêl • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: 1. Inescapable, unavoidable, inevitable. 2. Irresistible, inescapable.
Notes: Today's Good Word has recently become an 'orphan negative' alongside such stalwarts as, impeccable, hapless, inane, insipid, immaculate, impromptu, and nonchalant. Have you ever acted chalant? Even peccably so? That would seem to be an eminently luctable situation but it isn't because there is no positive form of ineluctable. You may use the adverb, ineluctably, and the noun, ineluctability, though.
In Play: The basic sense of this Good Word is hopeless inescapability: "Wilfred's following in his father's footsteps was as ineluctable as gravity." However, another important implication of today's orphan negative is a struggle with an urge: "Charlotte Russe found herself fighting an ineluctable urge to cross the restaurant to the dessert cart and help herself rather than wait for the waitress." I know one other person with a comparable urge: "An ineluctable attraction to the open road often strikes Lisa Carr in the course of faculty cocktail parties."
Word History: The Oxford English Dictionary, granddad of them all, cites the following use of the verb underlying today's adjective in 1682: "They did eluctate out of their injuries with credit to themselves." The meaning of the verb was to escape with a great struggle. English, however, apparently borrowed today's word independent of the verb from the Latin adjective ineluctabilis, based on in- "not" + eluctabilis "penetrable". The adjective here came from the verb eluctari "to struggle out of", composed of the preposition ex "out of" + luctari "to struggle".
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