Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
IMPLACABLE
Everyone knows someone—a teacher, an editor or writer, a colleague, a relative—whose stubborn and forbidding opposition is as great an obstacle as a boulder fallen onto the highway. The adjective for such immovable resistance is implacable, and it leads us down a winding Latin road.
Implacable (pronounced im-PLAK-uh-bl or im-PLAY-kuh-bl) means "not placable." If that satisfies you, you can move on.
Otherwise, we go to placable, which means "tolerant" or "easily soothed." It is related to placate, which means "to soothe" or "to modify." Both derive from placare, "to please."
So Latin takes placabilis, "placable," and adds the negative prefix in- to get inplacabilis, modified in English as implacable: "incapable of being appeased or pacified," "relentless," "incapable of being changed or modified." You know the type.
Example: Charles P. Pierce, writing in Esquire in September 2015 about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: "The city has been reconfigured according to radically different political imperatives in its schools and its housing and the general relationship of the people to their city and state governments. Many of them felt their lives taken over by anonymous forces as implacable as the storm was."