inexplicability
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: inexplicabilities
form: unexplicability
Etymology: From inexplicable + -ity.
Senses: examples: text: [T]he inexplicability of the general’s conduct dwelt much on her thoughts.
ref: 1803 (date written), [Jane Austen], chapter XXVI, in Northanger Abbey; published in Northanger Abbey: And Persuasion. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: John Murray, […], 20 December 1817 (indicated as 1818), →OCLC:
text: The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.
ref: 1887, Thomas Henry Huxley, “On the Reception of the ‘Origin of Species’”, in Francis Darwin, editor, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, volume I, New York: D. Appleton & Company, page 557:
text: […] Doctor McLaren had made a few last-minute substitutions for certain erudite terms he feared might overshoot his congregation; but, even with these begrudged alterations in the cause of clarity, the address was as one scientist to another, and the people who heard it were at once flattered and befuddled by its charming inexplicability.
ref: 1929, Lloyd C. Douglas, chapter 18, in Magnificent Obsession:
text: By Monday, the small town of Franklin, New Jersey (pop. 5,000), had become an Alfred Hitchcock crime scene, with two suspects arrested for murders so pointless that their inexplicability was virtually a cinematic device.
ref: 1997 October 5, Charlotte Faltermayer, “Delivered to their Deaths”, in Time:
synonyms: inexplicableness
glosses: The state of being difficult to account for; the state of being inexplicable.
examples: text: Both mother and daughter now fell into a train of painful perplexity and conjecture. Lady Delamore had long thought Mrs. Fermor’s carrying Mary off to town without permitting her to say adieu at Delamore Castle, detaining her so long there, and lady Frances Harcourt joining their mysterious party in town, very strange; while Mary’s short and formally restrained letters surprised and grieved her, now more inexplicabilities were added to the former, and what could all mean?
ref: 1806, [Catherine Cuthbertson], chapter XX, in Santo Sebastiano: or, The Young Protector. […], volume V, London: […] George Robinson, […], →OCLC, page 386:
text: For upwards of four years, whilst the crowd was puzzled with ‘hired kings,’ and many other inexplicabilities, I can truly affirm, that, to me, ‘Wharton was as plain,’ as if I had surveyed the interior of Sir Francis Burdett’s mind, uneased by its tegument of flesh; […]
ref: 1806 November 16, D. O’Bryen, “Mr. O’Bryen’s Most Marvellous Discovery. (From the Morning Post.)”, in Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, volume X, number 22, London: […] Cox and Baylis, […] Richard Bagshaw, […], published 29 November 1806, →OCLC, column 852:
text: We ask: Has this same ‘perhaps not ill-written Program,’ or any other authentic Transaction of that Property-conserving Society, fallen under the eye of the British Reader, in any Journal foreign or domestic? If so, what are those Prize-Questions; what are the terms of Competition, and when and where? No printed Newspaper-leaf, no farther light of any sort, to be met with in these Paper-bags! Or is the whole business one other of those whimsicalities and perverse inexplicabilities, whereby Herr Teufelsdröckh, meaning much or nothing, is pleased so often to play fast-and-loose with us?
ref: 1831, Thomas Carlyle, “Pause”, in Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh. […], London: Chapman and Hall, […], →OCLC, 2nd book, page 139:
text: Why thought became flesh, i e. pure unobjective thought clothed itself in objective forms, is, according to the Advaitin, an ultimate inexplicability of which no logical account can be given, even as the Hegelian account of an absolute all-inclusive whole of experience explicating itself yet in finite experience in a piecemeal temporal process is an inexplicability that does not admit of any explanation in terms of reason.
ref: 1962, Susil Kumar Maitra, “Thought and Reality”, in The Main Problems of Philosophy: An Advaita Approach, part 2, Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, →OCLC, pages 108–109:
synonyms: inexplicable#Noun
glosses: Something that is inexplicable.