Non-plussedness

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.

So why can’t I ever get what I want, like a power structure that’s faults & fissures are not so glaringly obvious as to mock our imagined non-plussedness during normaller, Clintonian times

The look that the goblin girl gave Vimes was one that he had seen many times before on the face of someone in receipt of Young Sam’s hugs: a mixture of surprise and what Vimes had to call non-plussedness.