/in-EF-uh-buhl/ adjective. Too great or powerful to be described. Inexpressible. Unutterable. Unspeakable.
It’s no coincidence that as I get older, the things I’m looking for—and in some cases things I forgot I was looking for—turn up in strange places. Finding my phone in the freezer or a spatula baked into a loaf of cinnamon quick-bread are thankfully not routine events, but they aren’t as unusual as I’d like. Interesting words similarly turn up in unexpected places. Like today’s word: ineffable, which I’ve seen many times before, but stood out when I came across it in a tweet by Lionel Media, a leading—something—in QAnon conspiracy circles (if you have to ask what QAnon is, you probably don’t want to know, but I’ll put a few explanatory links on the website to this potty theory of pizza, pedophiles and politics). Lionel Media wrote:
There are simply no words to explicate the profound and ineffable honor of meeting @realDonaldTrump in the tabernacle of liberty, the Oval Office
This is actually a precisely fitting use of the word: ineffable—meaning beyond description, inexpressible or even unspeakable—has traditionally been used in a religious context, often to refer to God’s grace or gifts, so Media’s invocation of ineffability in a “tabernacle” (albeit a rather non-traditional, oval-shaped one) makes for a rare bit of intelligibility amidst what is otherwise an unrelenting stream of lunacy.
But what about the word ineffable itself? Visually the root appears to be eff (E F F), but except as a cheeky stand-in for that most versatile of curses, there’s no such word. Which isn’t to say this non-word isn’t useful. As Avi Steinberg recounts in Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian:
During a debate with a fellow hustler, he scored major points when he said, “With all due, and undue, respect, the difference between me and you is the following: You are nonsensical while I, my brother, am ineffable. In case you ain’t mastered your diction, I’ll break that down for you—ineffable, meaning: I can not, and will not, be effed with.
Relatedly, to say something is “effable”—as in able to be described—doesn’t make sense to most listeners, overshadowed by effable’s vivid, slangy meaning, or as Douglas Adams put it in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
Ineffable is an example of an “unpaired” word, or a word that appears as if it should have a related opposite but doesn’t, or at least not one in common use. Consider words like “nonchalant” (has anyone ever been “chalant”), insipid (I guess I’d rather be sipid?) and inept (I’m totally ept). Ineffable is one of those, its opposite so archaic it might as well not be in use.
According to the indispensable Online Etymological Dictionary and the OED, Ineffable comes to us from the Latin effabilis, capable of being expressed, which is derived from effari, or to speak out, which comes from fari, to say or speak. Ultimately this traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root bha-, which meant “to speak.” Other derivations from that PIE root include words as various as aphasia, cacophony, fandango, nefarious—and a pair sure to please some listeners—professor and prophet.
Digging into some of these anciently related words leads to fascinating, and sometimes retrospectively obvious, connections. For instance the unpaired word infant (as far as I know, we don’t become fants as we grow) comes from the combination of the prefix in- (negation) + fans, a form of our friend fari, so infant literally means one who cannot speak.
Similarly fate goes back to fari as well, but in this case followed quite the opposite path, becoming fatum, or destiny…literally that which was spoken by the gods.
So ineffable emerged as a word of the inexpressibility of, or related to, God or the divine. One of the earliest examples is found in Tyndale’s 1526 Bible:
Thankes be vnto God for his ineffable gyfte.
Over the next few centuries, the use of ineffable broadened. No longer limited to that originating in the divine and unable to be expressed, ineffable came also to be applied to that which was not to be—or shouldn’t be—expressed, which is how we see it today at least as often as in the religious context.
For a brief time in the 19th century, the adjective ineffable was nounified in a significantly less dignified manner, being used to describe journalists or “swells” who were not to be named (the Illustrated London News describes “Two white-hatted and pegtopped ineffables”). For a short time the once divine term was even used to refer to trousers, calling them ineffables in the same way we still hear about undergarments being referred to as unmentionables, as poet William Cory wrote in an 1867 journal entry that he was crossing a stream with “Shoes off and ineffables tucked up,” which might be wildly misinterpreted today.
While I intend to wage a likely single-handed campaign to bring back ineffable scanties, the world of words continues to use it as a more elegant alternative to inexpressible and a less laden one than unspeakable.
In The Infinities, John Banville illuminates us thus:
when I use the word “father,” say, or “him,” or, for that matter, “me,” I do so only for convenience. These denotations are so loose, in the context, so crude, as to be almost meaningless. Almost, but not quite, yes. They shed a certain light, feeble as it is. They are a kind of penumbra, one might say, surrounding and testifying to the presence of an ineffable entity. But what a darkling chasm there lies between that glimmer and the speck it would illuminate.
Or as Jorge Luis Borges explained it in an interview in 1980:
BORGES: ~~I suppose that to him~~ the word is ineffable, it’s unspeakable, no? And he is right, because all words need something shared. If I use the word yellow, and if you have never seen yellow, you can’t understand me. And if I know the absolute, and you haven’t, you can’t understand me. That’s the real reason. All words imply a reality or an unreality shared by the speaker and by the hearer or by the reader and by the writer. But in many cases, in the case of ecstasies, that can only be told through metaphors, it cannot be told directly. ~~It has to be told through metaphors.~~
In a strange way, at least as far as style goes, ineffable has become almost mundane, all too often a shorthand for telling rather than showing…which makes logical sense but undermines the irrational alchemy, the weird magic, of writing as art.
But deft hands can still make deep work of potentially worn-out words, sometimes with a dose of meta-humor, as Donald Barthelme demonstrates in his story “Lightning.” Barthelme writes:
his great-grandfather, as it happened, had also been struck by lightning, blasted from the seat of a farm wagon in Brittany in 1909. In his piece Connors described the experience as “ineffable,” using a word he had loathed and despised his whole life long, spoke of lightning-as-grace, and went so far as to mention the Descent of the Dove. Penfield, without a moment’s hesitation, cut the whole paragraph, saying (correctly) that the Folks reader didn’t like “funny stuff”
There’s something tantalizing and tormenting about the unsayable and the unspeakable that proves to be catnip for writers, philosophers, artists and musicians—to say nothing of legions of more normal people nonetheless awake and wide-eyed in the middle of the night as an ineffable dream fades away. Perhaps that is as it should be. As Theodor Adorno said of philosophy, though he could have been speaking about creativity, generosity and simple human flourishing, “if philosophy can be defined at all, it is an effort to express things one cannot speak about.”
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