inextricable & inexplicable

Each of these words, which differ from one another by only two letters, describes a difficult web. The one is physical, the other mental, verbal. Actually, I suppose "inextricable" need not be physical - it is the man tied to a chair, the kid caught in thorns, but it is also the liar trapped by his lies. It is a physical image, I suppose, but anything hopelessly stuck, in actuality or otherwise, could be described by it. "Inexplicable" describes things that may not be tangled, but are of such a strange or wonderful nature that they tangle our words in any attempt to describe them. Colors, the sky, and even events. Often the word is used to describe an outcome or event that seems to have no realistic origin, such as a chair falling from the sky. The word in this context implies some unseen knot, one of circumstances that could produce such events without us being aware of the possibility, or mentally prepared to account for the event once it takes place.

The complicated arrays of letters that make up the words suit the tangle in both meanings; they begin and end easily, but what goes on in the middle - the "extric" and "explic" - is subtly more complicated and coincides with the acceleration of the word's pronunciation. The end effect is a hopeless jumble, of letters, of sounds, and in context, of circumstances.