The Paddling Upstream English word of the week is inept. It is a word of such magnitude it has no equal or opposite.
As we all--cough--learned in elementary school, you can stick an in- in front of certain words to create its opposite. The opposite of tolerable? In-tolerable. The opposite of edible? In-edible. The opposite of efficient? In-efficient.
The opposite of competent? In-competent.
Incompetent is the #1 definition of inept in Webster's Dictionary. We can all agree, whether someone is working on your truck, your taxes or your heart, you want someone who knows what they're doing. Someone who is competent, not incompetent.
Inept is worse. What is its equal? Where is its opposite?
No one hires someone because they're ept. I found inept in the dictionary in 2 seconds. Inept is trying to find ept.
But if you look at the origins of the word inept, you see it came from the French word inepte which derived from the Latin word ineptus which was a combination of in- and aptus. Aptus' English equivalent is apt in its 3rd & 4th meaning, appropriate, prepared, fitting, skillful.
The opposite of appropriate? In-appropriate.
So maybe inept should be spelled inapt. Or maybe I've just really digressed.
Inept is the Paddling Upstream word of the week because it is the one word that most closely describes decision makers in Trump's empire. Inappropriate. Unprepared. Ill-fitting. Skill-less.
The list of losses in different courts over DOGE initiatives, over extent of presidential powers, and, as of today's deadline, the unbelievable boneheaded move of submitting an indictment the full grand jury never saw shows there's nothing the administration is doing that can't be undone if your lawyers have been in a courtroom once and didn't get their licenses from a box of cracker jacks.
There is still terrible fallout from much of what they're doing. Innocent immigrants being harrassed and jailed when doing nothing wrong. Competent and reliable government employees were abused because they chose to serve their country honorably unlike the MAGA emperor himself. The millions of Americans who won't be able to afford healthcare because the pro-life party doesn't believe healthcare is a human right, especially if you're a human with a womb.
Over 74,000 Americans who were taking part in clinical trials across the country were left out in the cold by randomly cancelled grants by DOGE cuts on the National Institutes of Health. That's 74,000 people with health issues that might have been improved by the results of those trials. Some of them were actively taking experimental drugs, some of them were testing implants that would be removed when the trials were complete. Now what do they do? A number of these people will certainly die simply because of broken contracts.
That's a pro-life government for you. Put a pet-killing, science denying, sociopathic attorney in charge of healthcare and medicine. You know what that is?
Inept. There is no equal. Incompetence can be fixed. Training and a willingness to learn will cure incompetence 98% of the time. But ineptness comes with the blind conviction that no one could possibly be as ept as I am. Prove me wrong.