inextricably

You can almost see the original scene: a knot of rope, or maybe a fishing net, hauled up from some Roman workshop and then cursed at by the person trying to untangle it. Latin had a neat little escape hatch for that problem, extricare, 'to disentangle,' and then it slapped a negative in front of it—inextricabilis—so now the mess is beyond rescue. That same stubborn prefix gives us ordinary classroom words like inactive and incomplete, while the escaping verb behind it lives on in extricate, the word you use when the fire brigade gets someone out of trouble. English later added its familiar adverbial -ly, and suddenly the whole thing became a way to describe relationships that are knotted together so tightly they might as well be welded. Say 'inextricably linked,' and you are basically telling the listener: this is a tangle no one is getting apart with bare hands.