Dictionary

uninane en · ADJ

Etymology

From un- + inane.

Meanings

1. (rare) Not inane.
   • It was what I used to imagine when I was ten that a party here ought to be like. It was extremely gorgeous and uninane, as the band and trampling made talk impossible. c. 1935, Elizabeth Bowen, [Description of the 1935 hunt ball at Bowen’s Court]; quoted in Patricia Craig, edited by Emma Tennant, Elizabeth Bowen (Lives of Modern Women), Penguin Books, 1986, page 75:
   • To follow [Georges] Didi-Huberman on what the four photographs spirited out of Auschwitz do to the viewer, i.e. “faced with the photographs from August 1944,” one is “stunned, stupefied,” something does occur when one is all but uninane. 2010, Robert Harvey, “witlessness”, in Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of Responsibility, The Continuum International Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 96:
   • In fact, it had rather more to do with the four-day strain of Florida, with the wholly uninane exigencies of arranging for the burial of one parent and the survival of the other, that had put the household name and the Hallelujah Chorus behind him. 1981, The Atlantic, page 39, column 2:
   • What words for what then? How almost they still ring. As somehow from some soft of mind they ooze. From it in it ooze. How all but uninane. To last unlessenable least how loath to leasten. For then in utmost dim to unutter leastmost all. 1983, Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, New York, N.Y.: Grove Press, Inc., →ISBN, →LCCN, page 34:

Forms