• incondite •
Pronunciation: in-kahn-dit, -dait • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: 1. Badly constructed, crudely made, ill-composed or written. 2. Rough, crude, rude, unrefined, unpolished.
Notes: Here is a word reminiscent of recondite "abstruse, arcane, obscure". It comes with an adverb, inconditely, and a noun, inconditeness, appears a few times on the Web. I see no reason preventing its general use.
In Play: The first sense of today's Good Word may be used in sentences with concrete or abstract senses: "Teenagers lead lives of incondite structure until they learn how to organize themselves—and some of them never do." The second sense always refers to people: "In the process teenagers pass through a phase of incondite behavior."
Word History: Today's word is a remodeled form of Latin inconditus, made up of in- "not" + conditus "put together", the negated past participle of condere "to put together". All European Indo-European languages have a negative particle and prefix containing an N: English no and un-, German nein and un-, French non and in- and Russian ne, which serves as particle and prefix. Condere comprises con- "(together) with" + de-, a Proto-Germanic borrowing based on PIE dhe- "set, put", origin of English do and German tun "to do". In Latin, initial [dh] became [f], as in facere "to do". English borrowed many variants of this word, like fact, factor and factory. We also borrowed many words based on the combining form of this word, fic-, such as edifice, fiction, and suffice. (Let's all give Daniel Obertance a standing ovation for finding and sharing today's fascinating Good Word with us.)
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