单词本：intractable

最近我们干了个大事情，拉拢巴勒斯坦 16 个党派，签订了合作框架《北京宣言》。西方网友是这么评价的：

China is the land of grandmaster diplomats. Fixing the intractable political conflicts manufactured by the Anglo American Empire one by one.

intractable ：倔强的、棘手的、难治疗的。

它源自拉丁语 intractabilis 难处理的。in- 前缀表否定，tractabilis 可处理的。

举几个例子：

(CNN) — As a border crisis unfolded only months into Joe Biden’s presidency, he looked to his vice president to help solve an intractable issue: migration. 拜登推选，转向希望哈里斯解决移民这个棘手问题。¹

A few of the research topics recently garnering my attention are psychedelic-assisted therapies for intractable psychiatric conditions, interactions between the immune system and brain function, and computational approaches that promise to usher in elusive predictive and diagnostic markers for psychiatric conditions. ²

Intractable pain, also called intractable pain syndrome (IPS), is a severe, constant, relentless, and debilitating pain that is not curable by any known means and which causes a house-bound or bed-bound state and early death if not adequately treated, usually with opioids and/or interventional procedures. 维基百科上介绍得难治疗的疼痛症。³

tractabilis 来自拉丁语动词 tractare 处理、管理。对应的英语动词是 treat 处理。形容词 tractable意思是顺从的、驯服的、易处理的。

而 tractare 又可能来自 trahere 强力拖拉。拉丁语 trahere 的过去分词是 tractus 。

trahere 对应英语是 drag 拖拉。而 tractus 对应的英语 tract 表示大片的土地、通道，可能也可以理解为从地上拖拉出来一块地、拖拉的通道。

tracts of natural forest 大片大片的天然森林

the digestive tract 消化道，the respiratory tract 呼吸道 (Apple Dictionary 2024)

respiratory 可以参考我们之前学过的单词本： aspiration ，来自拉丁语 ad + spirare，ad 是 to ，spirare是呼吸。所以 aspire 的本意就是朝这最远的地方呼吸，即渴望、有志向于某事。

References