incapacious

English

Etymology

in- +‎ capacious

Adjective

incapacious (comparative more incapacious, superlative most incapacious)

1. Small; narrow; cramped; unable to hold or allow the passage of very much.
   • 1865, Eben Edwards Beardsley, The History of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, page 199:

     It is a contrast, to be contemplated with grateful emotions, that in a place where a century ago twenty-five families gathered in an incapacious wooden edifice to lift their hearts and voices to God , and to praise him in the forms of the Liturgy , there are now to be found at least a thousand families , and nearly two thousand communicants , cherishing the same Triune Jehovah, in larger, loftier, and more enduring or more costly temples.

   • 1884, A. A. Putnam, Ten Years a Police Court Judge, page 173:

     While the crowd are nestling into their places, the lawyers, preparatory to striking the first blow, are bustling round within the incapacious bar, each viewed with the eye of admiration by about half of the assembled multitude , and each viewed with the eye of scorn by about the other half .

   • 1922 September, Aldous Huxley, “The Problem of Architecture in the Town”, in House & Garden, volume 4, number 5:

     The high land values which forced the architects of the first cities to sacrifice the true architectural effect for long fac5ades, with no appreciable depth behind them, have now rendered the buildings of a hundred years ago too low and incapacious.

   • 2006, Gennadiĭ Efremovich Zaikov, ‎G. V. Kozlov, ‎R. G. Makitra, Theoretical and Practical Guide to Organic Physical Chemistry, page 113:

     For chemical reactions , proceeding in gs-micelles of NCPM, it is sufficient that large s-nanopores and incapacious ν-nanopores differ by structural-mechanical and thermodynamic properties.

2. Not capable; having limited abilities; weak, incompetent, and/or foolish.
   • 1617, Thomas Middleton, A Fayre Quarrell:

     Can art be so dim-sighted, learnèd sir? I did not think her so incapacious.

   • 1620, Owen Feltham, Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political:

     When Nature has doom'd him among the incapacious and silly, 't is not in the power of correction or instruction, or in all the arts, to cure him.

   • 1926, The Educational Measurement Review - Volume 2, page 5:

     The mute is linguistically incapacious; he cannot talk because he cannot think and consequently is silent in all languages. The mute is incapacious in oral language.

   • 2001, William J. Christmas, Labouring Muses, page 252:

     Beginning the poem with a generalized, second-person "You" suggests that Yearsley is addressing several "incapacious souls " who see the world through narrow lenses and " optics dim."

   • 2022, Craig M. Bethke, “Preface to First edition”, in Geochemical and Biogeochemical Reaction Modeling, page xviii:

     Computers filled entire rooms but were slow and incapacious by today's standards, and graphical tools for examining results almost nonexistent.

3. Small; limited, modest, lacking grandeur or nobility.
   • 1668, John Howe, The Blessedness of the Righteous:

     yet, inasmuch as he is capable of understanding the vast disproportions of time and eternity, of a mortal flesh and an immortal spirit, how preposterous a course were it and unworthy of a man, yea, how dishonourable and reproachful to his Maker, should he prefer the momentary pleasures of narrow, incapacious sense, to the everlasting enjoyments of an enlarged, comprehensive spirit?

   • 1684-1690, Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth

     Souls that are made little and incapacious cannot enlarge their Thoughts to take in any great Compass of Times or Things

   • 1842, John Addison Porter, A Poem, page 12:

     Yet let it be in trust, for who would wander through The Infinite, without an arm to uphold Him if he sinks; in humble faith, And not with mad ambition, bold, insatiable, Unsatisfied with time, but eager to distend Its incapacious soul with all the mysteries of Eternity.

   • 1846, Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy:

     But I must have, beside, the very man Whose slight, free, loose and incapacious soul Gave his tongue scope to say whate'er he would

   • 1868, Edward Robert Bulwer, Chronicles and Characters - Volume 1, page 256:

     Allah will not bring His heaven and earth together, just to wring Credence from creatures incapacious, slight, And void, as these.

4. Insufficient.
   • 1625, Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem: A just Appeale from two Unjust Informers, page 80:

     […] by buzzing them into popular eares and capaci- ties, incapacious of them, unable to comprehend them.

   • 1674, Ephraim Pagitt, Christianography, page 11:

     These my Letters are incapacious for mee to set downe at large the reasons so my dilatory answering your Grace.

   • 1838, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Seraphim, and Other Poems:

     Or that the subtle glory broke Thro' my strong and shielding wings, Bearing to my finite essence Incapacious of their presence Infinite imaginings

   • 1907, H.L. Fairchild, “Glacial Waters in the Lake Erie Basin”, in New York State Museum Bulletin, page 40:

     The Batavia channels might seem incapacious for the volume of water that would be contributed by so large a drainage area and from so long a frontage of melting glacier.

5. Incapacitating.
   • 2013, William Watkin, Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview, page 147:

     […] Agamben insists, one can still see even in darkness where what one sees is the colour of incapacity. […] Deleuzian obscurity is, like Agamben's incapacious darkness, a darkness that allows one to see.

   • 2023, David Marriott, Of Effacement: Blackness and Non-Being:

     What we call the corpus exanime is a suffering itself blackened by the incapacious assertion of its suffering; it is invaded, petrified by the gaze; but it can only experience itself as hemorrhaging that precedes every object-relation, every moi, and that follows indifferently from the social death of its finite life.

Related terms

• incapaciousness