incapacious
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Forms: form: more incapacious
form: most incapacious
Etymology: From in- + capacious.
Senses: examples: text: It is a contrast, to be contemplated with grateful emotions, that in a place where a century ago twenty-five families gathered in an incapacious wooden edifice to lift their hearts and voices to God , and to praise him in the forms of the Liturgy , there are now to be found at least a thousand families , and nearly two thousand communicants , cherishing the same Triune Jehovah, in larger, loftier, and more enduring or more costly temples.
ref: 1865, Eben Edwards Beardsley, The History of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, page 199:
text: While the crowd are nestling into their places, the lawyers, preparatory to striking the first blow, are bustling round within the incapacious bar, each viewed with the eye of admiration by about half of the assembled multitude , and each viewed with the eye of scorn by about the other half .
ref: 1884, A. A. Putnam, Ten Years a Police Court Judge, page 173:
text: The high land values which forced the architects of the first cities to sacrifice the true architectural effect for long fac5ades, with no appreciable depth behind them, have now rendered the buildings of a hundred years ago too low and incapacious.
ref: 1922 September, Aldous Huxley, “The Problem of Architecture in the Town”, in House & Garden, volume 4, number 5:
text: For chemical reactions , proceeding in gs-micelles of NCPM, it is sufficient that large s-nanopores and incapacious ν-nanopores differ by structural-mechanical and thermodynamic properties.
ref: 2006, Gennadiĭ Efremovich Zaikov, G. V. Kozlov, R. G. Makitra, Theoretical and Practical Guide to Organic Physical Chemistry, page 113:
glosses: Small; narrow; cramped; unable to hold or allow the passage of very much.
examples: text: Can art be so dim-sighted, learnèd sir? I did not think her so incapacious.
ref: 1617, Thomas Middleton, A Fayre Quarrell:
text: When Nature has doom'd him among the incapacious and silly, 't is not in the power of correction or instruction, or in all the arts, to cure him.
ref: 1620, Owen Feltham, Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political:
text: The mute is linguistically incapacious; he cannot talk because he cannot think and consequently is silent in all languages. The mute is incapacious in oral language.
ref: 1926, The Educational Measurement Review - Volume 2, page 5:
text: Beginning the poem with a generalized, second-person "You" suggests that Yearsley is addressing several "incapacious souls " who see the world through narrow lenses and " optics dim."
ref: 2001, William J. Christmas, Labouring Muses, page 252:
text: Computers filled entire rooms but were slow and incapacious by today's standards, and graphical tools for examining results almost nonexistent.
ref: 2022, Craig M. Bethke, “Preface to First edition”, in Geochemical and Biogeochemical Reaction Modeling, page xviii:
glosses: Not capable; having limited abilities; weak, incompetent, and/or foolish.
examples: text: yet, inasmuch as he is capable of understanding the vast disproportions of time and eternity, of a mortal flesh and an immortal spirit, how preposterous a course were it and unworthy of a man, yea, how dishonourable and reproachful to his Maker, should he prefer the momentary pleasures of narrow, incapacious sense, to the everlasting enjoyments of an enlarged, comprehensive spirit?
ref: 1668, John Howe, The Blessedness of the Righteous:
text: 1684-1690, Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth
Souls that are made little and incapacious cannot enlarge their Thoughts to take in any great Compass of Times or Things
text: Yet let it be in trust, for who would wander through The Infinite, without an arm to uphold Him if he sinks; in humble faith, And not with mad ambition, bold, insatiable, Unsatisfied with time, but eager to distend Its incapacious soul with all the mysteries of Eternity.
ref: 1842, John Addison Porter, A Poem, page 12:
text: But I must have, beside, the very man Whose slight, free, loose and incapacious soul Gave his tongue scope to say whate'er he would
ref: 1846, Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy:
text: Allah will not bring His heaven and earth together, just to wring Credence from creatures incapacious, slight, And void, as these.
ref: 1868, Edward Robert Bulwer, Chronicles and Characters - Volume 1, page 256:
glosses: Small; limited, modest, lacking grandeur or nobility.
examples: text: […] by buzzing them into popular eares and capaci- ties, incapacious of them, unable to comprehend them.
ref: 1625, Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem: A just Appeale from two Unjust Informers, page 80:
text: These my Letters are incapacious for mee to set downe at large the reasons so my dilatory answering your Grace.
ref: 1674, Ephraim Pagitt, Christianography, page 11:
text: Or that the subtle glory broke Thro' my strong and shielding wings, Bearing to my finite essence Incapacious of their presence Infinite imaginings
ref: 1838, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Seraphim, and Other Poems:
text: The Batavia channels might seem incapacious for the volume of water that would be contributed by so large a drainage area and from so long a frontage of melting glacier.
ref: 1907, H.L. Fairchild, “Glacial Waters in the Lake Erie Basin”, in New York State Museum Bulletin, page 40:
glosses: Insufficient.
examples: text: […] Agamben insists, one can still see even in darkness where what one sees is the colour of incapacity. […] Deleuzian obscurity is, like Agamben's incapacious darkness, a darkness that allows one to see.
ref: 2013, William Watkin, Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview, page 147:
text: What we call the corpus exanime is a suffering itself blackened by the incapacious assertion of its suffering; it is invaded, petrified by the gaze; but it can only experience itself as hemorrhaging that precedes every object-relation, every moi, and that follows indifferently from the social death of its finite life.
ref: 2023, David Marriott, Of Effacement: Blackness and Non-Being:
glosses: Incapacitating.
Related terms: incapaciousness