unspeakability
- noun
- /ʌnˈspiːkəˌbɪlɪti/
:
inexpresabilidad
- The horror of the concentration camps held an unspeakability that left survivors in silence.
Examples
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This move bears a marked resemblance to the "unspeakability" topos of classical rhetoric: like that commonplace, it allows speakers to make their listeners imagine something profound or important without actually obliging the speakers to articulate it.
Academic text (1996) -
While The Book of Not, published eighteen years after Nervous Conditions, exemplifies the condition of belatedness, this delay stems not only from the temporal structure of trauma, but also from the difficulties of crafting a speaking position from which to bear witness to the political as well as psychological unspeakability of racism in post-colonial Zimbabwe.
Academic text (2008) -
This kind of monist, mystic collapse into unspeakability ultimately makes us mute.
Blog text (5) -
It brings a postcolonial concern with race, identity, and subjectivity together with some of the core concerns of trauma theory: the problematic of witnessing extreme events, denial, loss, affect, and unspeakability.
Academic text (2008) -
As Kennedy observes, "The Book of Not brilliantly inscribes a young woman's struggle to achieve subjectivity in the context of the ongoing denial, forgetting, and the unspeakability.
Academic text (2008) -
In others, an attachment to realism and indigenous literary practices is interpreted as a deliberate eschewal of the Western discourse of unspeakability, recourse to which is seen as politically debilitating.
Academic text (2008) -
Witnessing such devastation brought forth an unspeakability that no words could capture.
-
The tragedy was so profound that it descended into unspeakability for those who experienced it.
Synonyms
1
7.6
A silence that shows meaning without words
A feeling or idea too hard to say in words
Hard to describe in words
Something you cannot say in words
A state that is impossible or very hard to describe in words
A state of being impossible to fully describe in words
Being unable to tell or share feelings with other people
How Expressible
Surface Forms
Morphology
unspeakability = unspeakable (transparent) = un + speak + able + ity
Formed by adding the noun-forming suffix '-ity' to the adjective 'unspeakable' (un- + speak + -able), producing a noun meaning 'the state or quality of being unspeakable.'
Etymology
Unspeakability comes from pieces you already know: un- meaning 'not', speak meaning 'to say', and the endings -able 'able to' and -ity 'state or quality'. So unspeakability means the 'state of not being able to be said', for example when something is too terrible or deep to put into words.