Sunday Word: Incommensurable

[sallymn]

incommensurable [in-kuh-men-ser-uh-buhl, -sher-]

adjective:
1 having no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison
2 utterly disproportionate
3 (of two or more quantities) having no common measure

Examples:

As the late philosopher Lawrence Becker proclaimed, 'autonomous human lives have a dignity that is immeasurable, incommensurable, infinite, beyond price.' (Frank Martela, Be Yourself - Everyone Else Is Taken, Scientific American, March 2020)

In Sewing Machine, 2000, the mechanism's operator - this time male - seems not to be sewing at all, but conducting some kind of shamanistic ritual that sends the other figures populating the painting's hallucinatory space into their own incommensurable realms of reverie. (Barry Schwabsky, Bass Culture, Artforum, January 2025)

In other words, spaces created with unmeasurable elements, which give an illusion of incommensurable continuity. (Cullen Murphy, An American Art Critic's 70-Year Love Affair With Rome, The Atlantic, November 2022)

Gringoire enjoyed seeing, feeling, fingering, so to speak an entire assembly (of knaves, it is true, but what matters that ?) stupefied, petrified, and as though asphyxiated in the presence of the incommensurable tirades which welled up every instant from all parts of his bridal song. (Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris)

How on earth can a set of events belonging to one order be experienced as a set of events belonging to an entirely different and incommensurable order? Nobody has the faintest idea. (Aldous Huxley, Island)

Origin:

"having no common measure," 1550s, from French incommensurable (14c) or directly from Medieval Latin incommensurabilis, from in- "not, opposite of, without" + Late Latin commensurabilis, from Latin com "with, together" + mensurabilis "measurable," from mensurare "to measure," from Latin mensura "a measuring, a measurement; thing to measure by," from mensus, past participle of metiri "to measure" me- "to measure"). (Online Etymology Dictionary)