I'm Adamantine About Obdurate, But Not Déclassé

Time to follow up on some words from previous posts.

On February 15, 2010 I closed my blog by writing “I won’t be obdurate or adamantine about it, no matter what the title says.” But I never got around to looking at those words.

Obdurate is an adjective that means unmoved or stubbornly resistant to moral influence. The first appearance of any form of the word was its noun form, obduration, in about 1400. I have not heard the noun form used, but have heard the adjective often. It appeared in the mid 1400s. The word in whatever form comes from the Latin word obduratus, which means “hardened” and is the past participle of obdurare, which means “be hard, hold out, persist, or endure.” In fact, endure comes from the root word of obdurare, durus, which means hard.

Obdurate is similar to contumacious or pervicacious, but obdurate has a moral quality the other two words do not, contumacious has a haughty quality the others don’t. Pervicacious you’ll have to let me know how it compares.

Adamantine is an interesting word to me. I thought it was the adjective form of the noun adamant, but adamant can also be used as an adjective, making adamantine duplicative. Adamantine also came to English directly from Latin in about 1200. The Latin word is adamantinus and means “hard as steel, inflexible.” It comes from the Greek word adamantinos, which is a form of adamus, from which in the mid-1400s English we got the noun form of adamant (through the Latin via the French word adamant). Its use as an adjective came into use late in the 1400s.

Adamus was also the Latin name of the hypothetical hardest material, and literally meant invincible. It meant hard as steel until the 1670s, when it was first used to mean unshakeable or stubborn or obdurate. Adamant the noun was used in antiquity (according to etymonline.com) of substances like white sapphire, steel, and diamonds. In Old English it was ađamas, which meant “a very hard stone.”

While obduracy is a force of will, being adamantine is a result of character or nature.

So many words for stubborn. I wonder if there are as many words for being nice and compliant.

Also, earlier this month I used the word déclassé. While I italicized it and used the accents the French requires, it turns out that it has made its way into English usage sufficiently that I could have just written declasse. While I have never seen it that way, etymonline.com lists it as such, and a search of dictionaries provides examples of its appearance without accent marks and non-italicized. It is possible that the change from French word being used in English to an English word is still in process, but since I have always heard it pronounced as a three-syllable word (dey-kla-sey) I think the non-accent spelling without italics is still premature. It’s been used in English since 1887, and has the same meaning in English that it does in French: to cause to lose class, status, or social standing. Of course, since I have never had class or social standing, I can’t personally become déclassé, and I am adamant about that. (But not obdurate.)