Implacability
By BEN ZIMMER, New York Times
Published: June 18, 2010
In my recent column on cool, I wrote, "From Old English to the ages of Chaucer and Shakespeare all the way to the present, cool has been able to mean 'dispassionate, calm, self-composed.' Some of our latter-day cool expressions — 'stay cool,' 'play it cool,' 'cool as a cucumber,' 'cool customer' — play off this ancient connotation of implacability." Catherine Harris e-mails: "I believe you meant to use imperturbability rather than implacability, describing the calm sense of cool. Someone who is implacable is relentless and unappeasable, not necessarily perpetually unruffled."
If there's one lesson I learned from many years of reading my illustrious predecessor William Safire, it's to show humility when called out by the Gotcha Gang. In a 1984 column, he introduced the Gotcha Gang as "that shock troop of Lexicographic Irregulars who specialize in correcting other language mavens." Safire later revealed the hidden benefit of publicizing Gotchas: "By ostentatiously wolfing down one slim slice of humble pie, I buy the license to take pops at everybody else for months without appearing to be a wiseguy."
Let this be my first On Language mea culpa: Harris (along with fellow Gotcha-ers Brian Hoffman, Peter Glasgow and Wade Richardson) rightly questions my use of implacability, which does not quite fit in the context of cool. Imperturbability would indeed have been a better choice, as would the more modern unflappability.
I cop to the malaprop, though my mix-up was not as blatant or farcical as the eponymous Mrs. Malaprop's constant misuse of language in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 play "The Rivals" (e.g., "He is the very pineapple of politeness," with pineapple standing in forpinnacle). I might have been influenced in my word choice by such cool words as placid and placate, but of course, implacability tends to imply just the opposite, an inability to be made calm.
In my modest defense, the "relentless, steadfast" shade of implacability can intersect with the unruffled nature of imperturbability, and in fact the adjectives implacable and imperturbable often appear side by side - or as linguists would say, they can easily "collocate" with each other. For instance, the newly published translation of Simone de Beauvoir's "Second Sex" by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier contains a line about "precise, imperturbable, implacable logic."
The overlap in usage between the two words doesn't absolve the linguistic error, however. In a vicious dissection of James Fenimore Cooper's many "literary offenses," Mark Twain offered some simple rules for writing as an antidote. My favorite is: "Use the right word, not its second cousin." This advice hits close to home, since I work as executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, which essentially creates interactive family trees of words with similar meanings. Implacability and imperturbability might have a passing family resemblance, but it's best not to treat them as blood brothers.
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