A Word A Day — evitable

with Anu Garg

Negativeland is the title of a slim novel I came across recently that’s written with a constraint. Here’s how it begins:

“None of the stations played anything good, but I kept at the buttons, pushing off songs from a childhood we were all supposed to have had. Commercials bothered me more than ever, news was propaganda, and traffic reports were no more useful than the weather. It wasn’t yet 1988, and I was driving home from Tacoma.”

Notice anything interesting in this paragraph? Anything in common in the three sentences? Well, the title of the book gives a hint. Each sentence in this book has something negative going on. All 186 pages of it. And it’s a tribute to the author that his self-imposed constraint doesn’t constrain the storytelling. There’s a long tradition of writing with self-imposed constraints. There’s a group called Oulipo that has tried many things, often with admirable results (also see lipogram and univocalic).

To purge all the negativity, in this week’s AWAD I’ll feature five words that are positive counterparts of terms usually seen in negative forms.

evitable

(EV-i-tuh-buhl)

adjective: Capable of being avoided or evaded.

From Latin evitare (to avoid).

“Racers insist they do it ‘for the glory’, which is a shrewd way of saying they do it for no good reason. This is an Entirely Evitable Event.”
Don Kahle; Kinetic Challenge Recalls Rickies; The Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon); Jul 18, 2008.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)