The adjective intricate is used to describe what is tangled, diffuse or thorny . The intricate, therefore, is unclear .
For example: “The investigators are doing a great job, but it is a very intricate case” , “The new film by the Australian filmmaker is intricate and difficult to follow” , “The young Englishman has been detained for three months, a victim of the intricate judicial system of the Asian nation.”
Suppose a journalist is investigating a corruption case involving several members of a government . The reporter tries to trace the financial movements that would involve black money, but the path is complex since it combines multiple firms in tax havens, various banks and front men. The journalist, therefore, maintains that there is an intricate network created to hide the illicit origin of the money and the identity of the true owners of the funds.
A path that runs through a nature reserve , meanwhile, can be classified as intricate when it is neither linear nor flat. A path of this type has multiple turns , ascends and descends depending on the section and requires crossing various obstacles, such as streams, hills, etc.
Let's take the case of a man who wants to obtain authorization to market his craft beer . To obtain this permit, you must first complete a form and deliver it to the Bromatology Office of the Ministry of Health. Once this step has been completed, you must contact us by telephone and request an appointment for an inspector to visit your production plant and study the environment and the beer in question. If this inspector approves the product, the manufacturer must take the document certifying the endorsement to the Production Secretariat and register its establishment. Finally, from this agency they must send two certified certificates by postal mail that the entrepreneur must display in his production plant and in the marketing premises. As you can see, the process is quite intricate , since it cannot be solved in a few steps.
The word intricate is not frequently used in popular language, but others such as confusing or complicated are used instead. Let's see below more of the various synonyms that we can use to replace it in our speech: convoluted, tangled, difficult, convoluted, rugged and scrambled . Two of its most common antonyms are: simple and clear .
The verb family of this adjective is intricate , and it is even less common in everyday speech than intricate . Its synonyms are practically the verbs corresponding to the aforementioned adjectives, although we can add some to expand the definition: distort , muddle and muddle .
From all these complementary terms we can delve a little deeper into the nuances of the meaning of intricate . One of the fundamental aspects of something that can be adjective in this way is the apparent arbitrariness that generates the confusion or difficulty that characterizes it. If we review the previous examples, we can notice this in the case of the judicial system of the Asian country and in the procedure to obtain authorization to market craft beer.
In neither of these two cases is it absolutely necessary that things be so complicated to understand, that the steps to follow be so difficult. However, just as in the case of the criminal network that the journalist in the other example must penetrate, there is a clear intention to slow down anyone who tries to reach the deepest level. We are not talking about a natural path that for various reasons has become very difficult to follow, but about consciously created structures, which is why there is always a reason for them to be intricate.