meaning of 'inexorable love'

[Nessie]

Hi,
Do you find the following phrase unnatural (in meaning):

[MrPedantic]

Hello Nessie,

Usually, when something is "inexorable", it is "not easy to persuade or move". (Thus Shakespeare says "more inexorable far / Than empty tigers or the roaring sea".)

The phrase "inexorable love for her" might be construed in two ways:

1. As a description of someone else's love, e.g. "his inexorable love for her". Here, it means that it would not be easy to dissuade "him" from loving "her".

2. As a description by the person who is in love, e.g. "my inexorable love for her". Here, it is more complex: the speaker presents his love as something outside himself, which is not susceptible to persuasion.

I wouldn't call it an unnatural phrase, in terms of the meaning of the word; but "inexorable" is now often associated with phenomena such as powerful approaching armies, Fate, ascendancy to high political office, etc. So it might seem a surprising collocation to some people.

Best wishes,

MrP

[Molly]

Here you can see how "inexorable" is used, per million words, over registers in BrEng:

SPOKEN 0.2
FICTION 1.1
NEWSPAPER 1.4
ACADEMIC 2.8
MISC 2.0

In the Academic register, "inexorable logic" seems to be the most frequent collocation.
In the Fiction register, "inexorable process" seems to be the most frequent collocation.

Way down the chart, with only one showing per million words, is this nice little collocation - if we may call it so:

"She was the tide, and Rohan her inexorable moon , beckoning her without mercy to some unknown strand." (Tower of shadows. Craven, Sara. Richmond, Surrey: Mills & Boon, 1993.)

That fits with MrP's # above.

So it seems the poetic collocations are few are far between in modern use. Maybe if we had a Mills & Boon corpus, we'd find quite a few more poetically/romatically inclined "inexorable + noun" combinations.

http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/x.asp