| 词组 | inexecrable |
| 释义 | inexecrable Usage books by two commentators— Shaw 1975, 1987 and Einstein 1985—talk about this mysterious hard word as if they had actually seen or heard it in recent times. We do have a note on it that appeared in the British scholarly publication Notes and Queries in 1967. But we have little hard information on the word and no modern examples of use (as distinct from discussion) at all. It appears to be an obsolete Englishing of Medieval Latin inexecrabilis "unappeasable." Its best-known occurrence is in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1597): • O, be thou damn'd, inexecrable dog! Shakespeare's use has been emended to inexorable in modern editions of the play. Since the epithet is flung at Shylock in the scene in which he will not be dissuaded from collecting the pound of flesh, the change is reasonable; the senses of the two words are very close. But it is worth noting that when the line is removed from context, inexecrable can easily be interpreted as an intensive form of execrable "detestable." The OED has one other example, from 1594, and the word was also used by Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy (1592). If in modern use (of which we have only the inferential evidence mentioned above) the word means "inexorable," it could be viewed as a mistake—which is how Shaw views it—or as a revival of the obsolete meaning. We suspect, however, that inexecrable is more likely to be used as a strong synonym of execrable. |
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