Ungetroundable

If points cannot be maintained by unanswerable and ungetroundable arguments, then let all the puerile defections be fully unfolded to the scrutiny of the readers of the ubiquitous Rural.

The problem of earning their own living is one with which scores of thousands of women are brought to face every year, and being a very ugly, hard and ungetroundable problem, seen from squarely in front with the wolf snarling in the background, it is a matter of interest and congratulation to many women when one ingenious toiler contrives a new solution.

Texts of law remain, writ large, as Hart rightfully argues, “open textured” not only because of our “relative ignorance of fact” but also because of our “relative indeterminacy of aim,” not only because of our inability to “regulate, unambiguously and in advance, some sphere of conduct by means of general standards to be used without further official direction on particular occasions,” but also because of the ungetroundable fact that “human legislators have no such knowledge of all the possible combinations of circumstances which the future may bring” (1961: 125).[…]In pursuance of this aim I have to expose inconsistencies and contradictions where they seem to me to be ungetroundable.

In a lazy simplification, Watt casts the Beckettian and the Troubles as ‘ungetroundable’ (a borrowed term from Muldoon’s criticism) facts, adhering to his subjects’ poetry.

He also acknowledged, however, that cultural anthropologists were as prone to bias as anyone else working in the field, referring to ‘the ungetroundable fact that all ethnographical descriptions are homemade, that they are the describers’ descriptions, not those of the described’ (Geertz 1988: 144–5).