inveigle

A dark knotting root of a word. It opens like invention but also like invective and inveigh, with the contrastive verve and venality of the 22nd letter. A tangle is invigilated as it runs into its crumple zone, like a train of x-height letters piling into an earthen wall. Proceeding from a handle at the back end, however, we see it like a key – or a gun: it seems to open, but only lets you into trouble. Its twisting darkness is created by the g and l, a combination that makes the nervous gulping of a guilty gull, but also jiggles and wriggles, even as it burgles or straggles. In its torsions this word invites beguilement. It is every bit the child of darkness it seems; it came into our world  from French as aveugler, to blind, and sightlessly groped through to gain the inductive in- by way of en-, added by analogy or mistaken belief.