Adamantine I am

Adamant, the older dictionaries (those only a little younger than myself) tell us, is a noun, referring to a substance, whether real or mythical, that was tougher than tough.

The word is Greek in origin, consisting of the negative prefix ‘a’- (= 'un-' or 'non-') and the stem of the vb damao = to conquer, tame or kill. So in olden times it might be applied either as an adjective to describe a substance too hard and solid to destroy, let alone to bend or melt or carve; or it might be used as a noun - a name perhaps for a very tough steel, or a diamond.

It certainly entered our language (Old English), via Old French, as a noun. By the seventeenth century it could mean the magnetic ‘lodestone’; by the eighteenth, the diamond. Right up to the middle of the twentieth century it was a noun: if you wrote “But Gladstone remained adamant”, you wrote metaphorically, just as you might say “His voice was thunder”.

Then the rot set in. “I am adamant”, some idiot must have thundered in the House of Commons, “that such a law shall never be passed”. “We are all adamant that it shall !” retorted the opposition.* And a new usage was born. The term adamant was weakened: it had become a verb participle meaning ‘insisting that’.

Hello - I seem to have used the noun ‘thunder’ as a verb in that last paragraph. How inconsistent can a pedant get ?

* Please don't take this account too literally. Check the details in Hansard.

Adamantine I am