non-plussedness

Example Sentences

• "His lecture, which occupied the lion’s share of two hours, was interesting from beginning to finish, and the auditors were loathe^([sic]) to hear the end of a discourse that to the housekeeping portion of it will be a source of non-plussedness to the butcher and dairyman."
• "Whereupon poor Elaine was so overwhelmed with embarrassment and non-plussedness that she fled with precipitate haste to Vespers . . ."
• "The non-plussedness at still being there, so close to one’s nothingness and littleness, is a new kind of peace."
• "We say, “It’s all Greek to me.” We don’t say it’s all Chinese, or it’s all Arabic, or it’s all Nascapi. No, it’s the Greek tongue which has become synonymous with intellectual non-plussedness, and may I remind you that that race achieved mastery of the language centuries ago."
• "He and Richardson, still in Hollywood, had exchanged letters and cables, showing that both were, as he told Burrell, ‘in the same helpless state of non-plussedness’."
• "It will eschew all games of ‘wit’ (through which it snarls itself up immediately in institutional snares) in favour of an absolutely ‘silent objectality’: towards unspeakable, unrepresentable, unrepresentative, utterly weak, lost, catatonic objects, objects that have nothing to say, objects that slip away from ‘meaning’ at every turn into a zone of non-plussedness, where nothing can be added to them without detracting from them – an objectality for an unfixable migratory subjectivity-in-process, on the move away from itself."