unclockable

English

Etymology

From un- +‎ clockable.

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -ɒkəbəl

Adjective

unclockable (comparative more unclockable, superlative most unclockable)

1. (of a car) Having an odometer that cannot be altered to provide a fake reading.
   • 2001, Autocar - Volume 230, Issues 1-5, page 47:

     Oddy also claims that any car you intend to buy almost certainly has a genuine mileage as complicated electronics make them famously unclockable.

2. At a speed that cannot be measured.
   • 1985, Dick Lally, Pinstriped Summers: Memories of Yankee Seasons Past, page 119:

     Sam McDowell had come over from the San Francisco Giants on the same day, and the left-hander with the host of personal problems and unclockable fastball was still on the roster, always a threat to live up to his immense talent.

   • 2001, Barbara Joans, Bike lust: Harleys, women, and American society, page 135:

     Sharon can take off at unclockable speeds and be racing down the highway before the guys have shifted into fourth.

   • 2017 January 20, Virginia Heffernan, “One Nation, Divided By A Common Language”, in Fast Company:

     Thanks to the internet, the American language seems to be exploding at an almost unclockable pace.

   • 2018 August 12, “The Week in Review: Wrong-Distance Race Overshadows More Pervasive Timing Woes”, in Thoroughbred Daily News:

     Yet here’s the more pervasive problem: I don’t buy the logic that a single race as Saratoga is unclockable when every week, at tracks all across the country, races are being “silently” contested with skewed fractional and final times, largely because of ambiguous “about” distances, clocking equipment malfunctions, human errors, and ever-changing timing beam run-ups that vary not only from track to track, but from race to race over the same courses.

3. At a time that cannot be measured or identified.
   • 1956 -, Mind, page 468:

     With these protracted and unclockable events, a moment or date may be given when the goal has certainly not yet been reached, and another when it certainly has ; but it is impossible to come any closer to an exact moment within that period.

   • 1973, Andrew Salkey, Anancy's Score, page 55:

     Brother Anancy, like most just-arrive grabalicious samfie-man, drinking more than one spider fair share of whites, and people seeing him as he spangle staggering round the village at all sort of unclockable hours.

   • 1976, Aspen Anthology - Issues 1-4, page xxi:

     For unclockable hours I plead Sloughing my heat for the elm's gilded leaves.

   • 1982, Guy Davenport, Tatlin!: six stories, page 236:

     Elders en nergens elders, forever arriving, forever saying vaarwel, the nether we posit there, the coast of a landfall with unfamiliar light, with time unclockable and space uncertain and walled.

4. Being undetectably homosexual.
   • 2006, Frank León Roberts, Marvin K. White, If We Have to Take Tomorrow, page 12:

     I'm worried that the measure is no longer what you're building with your hands - a safer block or a better world but in what dap, fist pumping, jaw connecting punch, how unclockable you are. How undetectable your homosexuality is.

   • 2010, R. Sneed, Representations of Homosexuality, →ISBN:

     With the notable exception of Ray's best friend Kyle, all the black queer men in Harris' novels are “unclockable,” that is, they present an image of heterosexuality.

   • 2014, Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr., Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing, →ISBN:

     The figure of the “unclockable” thug-like figure, in his malleability and inaccessibility to the larger public, has become the enabling device for more punitie discussions of DL men -- rather than the middle-class affluent brothers who also participate in discreet performances of same-sex desire.

5. (transgender slang) Not recognizable as transgender or a drag performer; passing.
   • 2014, Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, →ISBN:

     She told me the older girls she knew (“These fierce, unclockable bitches!”) went to a doctor in Waikiki who prescribed hormones for girls as young as sixteen.

   • 2018 March 9, Monica Beverly Hillz, “I'm a trans woman and a drag queen. Despite what RuPaul says, you can be both”, in The Washington Post:

     I had never met anyone like her, and I was blown away by how unclockable — or passable for a woman — she was.

   • 2018 August 14, Stephen Daw, “Decade Of 'Drag Race': The Show's 50 Best Musical Moments”, in Billboard:

     Her vocals were excellent, her impression was almost unclockable, and the queen proved why she deserved to stay until the end of the competition.

6. (more generally) Unreadable; undetectable.
   • 2010, The Malahat Review - Issues 170-173, page 54:

     ...plants a stake that casts no shadow, and who himself stands there unclockable, beyond the nothing-new reach of the sun.

   • 2018 June 21, Ione Gamble, “Online, I'm the Picture of Health. Offline, I Have a Chronic Illness”, in Vice:

     It causes stomach pain, weight loss, diarrhea, fatigue, and more, but is largely unclockable to an outsider's gaze.

Antonyms

• clockable