Word of the Day

Friday January 29, 2010

inscrutable [in-SKROO-tuh-bul]

adjective

Difficult to understand; impossible or difficult to be explained or accounted for satisfactorily; obscure; incomprehensible.

"History is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts, and events that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known truth," Burns said. "It is an inscrutable and mysterious and malleable thing. Each generation rediscovers and reexamines that part of its past that gives its present - and, most important, its future - new meaning and new possibilities."

Eric Moskowitz, "Flmmaker tells BC grads to revisit history" Boston Globe, May 19, 2009
As both couples struggle with their woes, a bearded Cantona pops up here and there as a French film director. He delivers inscrutable musings on the nature of love - namely that the intensity of a relationship's start defines its chances of success.

David Edwards, "French Film, Movies", The Daily Mirror, May 15, 2009
In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) A Polish-born British novelist. Heart of Darkness (1899)

Origin of the Word

Inscrutable, approximately 1450, derives from Late Latin inscrutabilis, from in- "not" + scrutari "examine, ransack": scrutiny, careful examination.