amenable = "understandable(?); comprehensible?"

[Jonathan Lighter]

2006 Ian McEwan in Robin Headlam Wells & Johnjoe McFadden, eds. _Human Nature: Fact and Fiction_ (London: Continuum) 40: Greatness in literature is more intelligible and amenable to most of us than greatness in science. All of us have an idea...of what is meant by a great novelist....We have the privilege of unmediated contact....Greatness in science is harder for most of us to grasp....[F]ew of us have had the kind of intimate contact that would illuminate the particular qualities of the achievement.

  Whatever it means, it ain't _my_ "amenable."

  As in my "double negative" post, Ian McEwan, CBE, is a well-known English novelist.


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