At one time, as far as I could tell, only one writer in the English Lanaguage ever used the word "ineluctable" in a sentence -- never mind if correctly. That was James Joyce, and who can tell if it's correct? In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is walking on a beach with his eyes closed, and goes on about
"the ineluctable modality of the visible."
Um. Well, all right, then! That's why nobody after him ever tried it.
Until Jesse Kellerman, on p. 37 of his second novel, Trouble. His character, Jonah Stem, is looking at a photo.
"But he noticed--had to notice---because he wasn't blind, after all, and he was a normal human male, and anyway the fact was ineluctable: Eve Jones was very, very pretty."
What a sad thing it is that he has such a narrow definition of what is "normal" for a human male. But wait! I'm told that Barbara Ehrenreich uses "ineluctable" in her new book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, and you know she wouldn't have a gay slam in any of her books! This will be the best yet!
THE DEFINITION
Oh my! I just realized what "ineluctable" means! Okay, the literal meaning is "that can't be struggled out of." So, above, "the fact couldn't be struggled out of: Eve Jones was very, very pretty." It's similar to "inevitable" and "inescapable", but not quite the same. It's more about something you would think you could avoid but find you can't. You are tied with gossamer threads.
Well, what the Eve Jones sentence means is..."There's no getting away from it [or "around it"], Eve Jones was very, very pretty." You could correctly say to someone who jumps into a pit full of lions, "There's no getting around it, you're going to be eaten." But you probably wouldn't. The inevitability is clear (maybe ineluctable!)--you would say, "Help, my friend is going to be eaten by lions!" It's a waste of the fine subtlety of the word to use it so casually in place of inevitable. Ineluctable, though it derives from the latin root for "struggle", isn't best used in physical settings. You can do it, but there are more familiar words that work just as well. But if there's no getting around the corrupt process of nominating candidates for elective office, then the corruption is ineluctable.
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