Monday, July 27, 2009

ineluctable

ineluctable \in-ih-LUCK-tuh-buhl\, adjective:

Impossible to avoid or evade; inevitable.

. . .ineluctable as gravity.
-- Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam
California's vision of itself as a car culture grew out of the impracticality of mass transit in reaching most of its scenic wonders, the innate restlessness of its inhabitants and the ineluctable attraction of an open road.
-- "From the Land of Private Freeways Comes Car Culture Shock", New York Times, October 16, 1997
Linnaeus' classification scheme became popular not because it captured some ineluctable truth about nature. Rather, by the botanist's own admission, the system divided species based more on intuition than science, much as an art historian might group paintings into schools.
-- "Cultivating a New Tree", Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1999

Ineluctable is from Latin ineluctabilis, from in-, "not" + eluctari, "to struggle out of, to get free from," from ex-, e-, "out of" + luctari, "to struggle."

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