#pedantry

So, if "inept" is a word, can you be "ept"?

A quick websearch indicates that Excess Profit Tax and Expidited Partner Therapy are THINGS (let's not even talk about Ethanolaminephosphotransferase), but no. Is ept a word in-and-of itself?

FORTUNATELY, the folks at Grammarphobia.com have an answer:

Q: On a recent Leonard Lopate show, a caller said she was laughed at as a child for using “ept’” as the opposite of “inept.” Pat replied that “ept” was actually a word—a humorous invention. I don’t see “ept” in my dictionary, nor “ane,” nor “ert.”

A: No, you won’t find “ept” in standard dictionaries, but the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for the adjective, with written examples dating back to the 1930s. The OED even includes the adverb “eptly” and the noun “eptitude.”

Oxford credits the New Yorker writer E. B. White with the first recorded use of “ept.” In a letter dated October 1938, he said, “I am much obliged … to you for your warm, courteous, and ept treatment of a rather weak, skinny subject.”

The dictionary says “ept” means adroit, appropriate, or effective. It describes the word as a back-formation and “deliberate antonym” of “inept.” A back-formation is a word formed by dropping part of an earlier word.

Although the OED doesn’t have entries for “ane” or “ert,” it does include them (as humorous antonyms for “inane” and “inert”) in its entry for “ept.”

Here’s the citation, from the Sept. 7, 1966, issue of Time magazine: “With the exception of one or two semantic twisters, I think it is a first-rate job—definitely ept, ane and ert.”

By the way, many listeners wrote Pat after her appearance on the WNYC show to point out that “inept” had a more conventional antonym: “adept.”

But interestingly, these two words weren’t always opposites. In fact, “adept” didn’t even exist when “inept” showed up in the first decade of the 1600s. And when it did appear, “adept” had an entirely different meaning from its usual one today.

When “inept” first showed up, according to the OED, it had several meanings: not adapted; unsuited, or unfit; without aptitude; absurd; wanting in reason or judgment; silly or foolish.

It can be traced to the Latin ineptus, which the OED defines as “unsuited, absurd, foolish.” The Latin word is composed of the negative prefix in- plus the noun aptus, meaning a general tendency.