Exorable

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Capable of being moved by entreaty or persuasion; susceptible to being influenced through earnest appeals or requests
2. Able to be swayed by earnest pleas or persistent appeals to reconsider a firm position
3. Responsive to heartfelt entreaties or determined efforts to change one's resolve through persuasion

Etymology: English kept the word for the judge who cannot be moved and nearly lost the one for the judge who can. "Inexorable" marches through history books and weather forecasts, while its positive twin, exorable, sits quietly in the dictionary, perfectly good and almost never used. Both come from Latin. The verb "orare" meant to speak, plead or pray, and it also gives English "oration," "orator," "oracle" and "adore." Add the prefix "ex-," here meaning thoroughly or to the end, and you get "exorare": not merely to plead but to plead successfully, to win someone over by entreaty. From that verb Latin built "exorabilis," capable of being prevailed upon, and its negative "inexorabilis," the one no pleading can reach. Romans used the negative for stern people and unbending gods, and also for fate itself: Virgil, in the Georgics, wrote of "inexorabile fatum," the fate that hears no prayers. English borrowed both from Latin in the sixteenth century, the age when scholars imported Latin adjectives by the hundred. Their fortunes then split, and Virgil had already shown why. "Inexorable" arrived able to describe not only a hard-hearted person but an impersonal force, and English took that use and ran with it: fate, time, logic, decline, the advance of an army. Something that cannot be begged off is a useful idea, and the world supplies endless things that ignore our pleading. The positive word had no such second life. Nobody talks fate round, so there is little call to say a force can be persuaded. Being open to persuasion is something only a person can be, and for people ordinary speech already had plainer ways to say that someone might give in. Exorable survives as a scholar's word, most often met as a deliberate echo of its far busier opposite.

Synonyms: persuadable, yielding

Antonyms: inexorable, unyielding