inimitously

I had wanted to write the following:

it is their own inimitous ardency, rather than peace, that transfixes them.

Yet I discover that “inimitous” is not considered to be a word.  I find that somewhat unfortunate, but I’m not sure that I should trust myself to invent it – not because I have anything against inventing words, but because I doubt it would be understood as I meant it, and, though I was enjoying myself at the time I came up with it, and was not placing some idea of broad communication ahead of whatever I wanted to communicate, I was not writing in a mode, or thinking of myself as writing in a mode, the poetic mode, in which enjoyment or self-enjoyment was to be taken as a primary and adequate end in itself. I was trying to make a point and share a thought that I already had reason to suspect might not be welcomed.

What did I mean or did I think I meant by “inimitous ardency”?  Clearly I was in part feeling my way to an idea of “enmity,” but also perhaps just feeling “enmitous.” A clause I had just struck from the text emphasized that the ardency to which I was referring relied on the isolation or construction of enemies or enemy images, but I was also thinking of a recent unpleasant series of exchanges with a young anarcho-pacifist on Twitter, and was coloring the recollection with moments of unpleasantness in relation to discussion with my good pacifist-universalist friend Mr. Miller.

I may yet put “enmitous” or the full clause back in the “thought,” but only after I’ve had a chance to consider how the irony of pointing to someone else’s putative “enmity”-ness works – that is how it looks to be expressing what may be taken as enmity towards others for their supposedly showing unconscious or unacknowledged enmity while pretending to be in some way above enmity or at least above crude forms of enmity.

Yet “inimitous” also looks like and might work as a deprecatory (too obscure to qualify as fully derisive) variation on “inimitable.”  Inimitous ardency might be the ardency of someone who thinks him-/herself inimitable, is trying to “stand out” as unique, but is really just offering up more of the same-old – like the pacifist who is really just engaging in public masturbation, no different in some important and self-undermining, hypocritical way from non-pacifists, but perhaps also like the blogger who thinks he’s thinking something interestingly novel…