intractable

Pronounced: in-TRAK-tuh-bull, adj

Notes: I’ve read this word enough that I recognize it, but my understanding was off a bit

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Yesterday’s word

The word winkle means

• to displace, remove, or evict from a position
• to obtain or draw out by effort

First usage

Our word came into English in the late 1910s or early 1920s

Background / Comments

I have run across our word in the Peter Wimsey stories by Dorothy Sayers (but I cannot recall the exact story or stories). From the context, I was pretty close to the second definition above. Our word is a shortening of periwinkle, which is a marine or freshwater snail (and it is a not a simple task to exact one from its shell). The word periwinkle came from the Latin word pina (the name of a mussel) and the Old English word wincle (a snail shell). During World War I, the Allies found that removing enemies from the trenches was as hard as extracting a well-entrenched snail. They began to use our word to describe their efforts – later, it expanded in a figurative sense, such as “winkling information out of someone”.