Opacity?

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means” — Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

In a court appearance last fall, Rudy Giuliani used “big words” in his opening statement. The only problem was the big word used meant the opposite of what he intended. He used opacity when the bigger word transparency was what he wanted.

Opacity comes from the French word meaning shadow, lack of transparency, or obscurity, which came from the Latin opacitas, meaning shadow or darkness. Transparency, on the other hand, comes from the combination of the Latin trans- (across, through, over) and parere (to appear).

Our opening quote today comes from the movie The Princess Bride*, where the character Vizzini (played by Wallace Shawn, a man I once inadvertently walked in on while he was in the bathroom) keeps exclaiming “inconceivable.” That word is the combination of the prefix in- which is used to negate the root conceive and the suffix -able. We’ll get to words where the in- prefix isn’t used to negate things in another article. Conceive comes from the French meaning to form something, whether it is an idea or a fetus.

*This is an Amazon affiliate link.