nonsensibility

English

Alternative forms

• non-sensibility

Etymology

From non- +‎ sensibility.

Noun

nonsensibility (uncountable)

1. The quality of being nonsensible.
   • 1842, Edward N. Shannon, “The Flaming O’Flanagans”, in Tales, Old and New, with Other Lesser Poems, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Co.; Dublin: Machen, stanza I, page 307:

     Oghone, Miss Malone, I’ll tache you some civility! Judy O’Doody, escape if you can! I’m the boy that will bother your nonsensibility, / Loving most women—and fearing no man: […]

   • 1887 August, Borderer, “A Pillar of Salt”, in Baily’s Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, volume the forty-eighth, London: A. H. Baily & Co., published 1888, pages 12–13:

     New comers at an hotel are generally made objects of gapeseed—here all seemed thrown together without the stiffness and restraint of ordinary British nonsensibility, and in five minutes I was deep in all the mysteries of kennel management—the merits of the Peterborough hound show, and so through the long lane that leads to a sportsman’s paradise.

   • 2013, John Davies, God versus Particle Physics: A No-Score Draw, Andrews UK Limited, →ISBN:

     The suggestion that the Higgs boson ‘explains’ the creation of the universe by giving mass to something that exists without having any existence is also as breathtakingly surreal as the suggestion that the universe came about when God breathed life into it. It is not possible to envisage any process which might underlie either. So why do so many of us express a preference for scientific nonsensibility rather than religious nonsensibility, when both are equally experientially bankrupt?