unloquaciousness
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Etymology: From unloquacious + -ness.
Senses: examples: text: We perhaps owe to a boy actor who happened to have a beautiful singing voice the moving snatches of song he gave to the distracted Ophelia and the heart-rending beauty of Desdemona’s Willow Song. Perhaps his voice had cracked when Shakespeare wrote King Lear, and Cordelia’s beautiful silence, her extreme unloquaciousness, which is so impressive in a play in which everyone else talks so much and so loudly, was something that Shakespeare’s imagination ‘found’ in writing for a company in which the best boy actor could only speak in a voice that was ‘soft, gentle and low’.
ref: 1968 October, Helen Gardner, “Shakespearian Tragedy”, in Religion and Literature, London: Faber and Faber […], section “Religion and Tragedy: The T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, Delivered at Eliot College in the University of Kent at Canterbury, October 1968”, pages 68–69:
text: He was off to rescue any number of less fortunate people, many of them darker than himself. His conventional manners stood for order, and his unloquaciousness was the modesty of the doomed.
ref: 1987, Mavis Gallant, “Its Image on the Mirror”, in Douglas Daymond, Leslie Monkman, editors, On Middle Ground: Novellas by Clark Blaise, Keath Fraser, Mavis Gallant, Malcolm Lowry, John Metcalf, Audrey Thomas, Ethel Wilson, Toronto, Ont.: Methuen Publications, →ISBN, page 211:
text: Lt. Gen. Sir Brian Horrocks, who served under Wavell in the 2d Division and admired him greatly, nevertheless refers to his unloquaciousness as an “almost pathological taciturnity.”
ref: 1988, Harold R. Winton, “The Quest for a Mobile Division, 1934–1938”, in To Change an Army: General Sir John Burnett-Stuart and British Armored Doctrine, 1927–1938 (Modern War Studies), Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, →ISBN, note 107, page 215:
text: When Clinton’s triangulation and the voters’ sense of contentment with incumbents enabled him to win re-election, Gingrich realized that Republicans would have to compromise with Clinton and mostly mark time until a breakthrough could be achieved in 2000—and that breakthrough looked to be, if still possible, far from certain in 1997 and 1998. The ouster of Gingrich and the installment of Dennis Hastert, then unknown outside the House, in January 1999, gave House Republicans a leader of the temperament and unloquaciousness capable of pursuing such a course.
ref: 1999, Michael Barone, “Introduction”, in Michael Barone, Grant Ujifusa, The Almanac of American Politics 2000: The Senators, the Representatives and the Governors: Their Records and Election Results, Their States and Districts, Washington, D.C.: National Journal Group, Inc., →ISBN, page 43:
text: Mean-times, spelling and pronunciation are horrendously uncircumvoluted and the English vocabulary simply oozes with unloquaciousness. Irregardless of whether I say “wreck a nice beach” or “recognize speech,” you know what I mean, unless I say it too fast.
ref: 2007, David F. Latham, “English Difficult? Au Contraire”, in American Rambler: 48 Original, Hilarious, Laugh-Out-Loud Newspapers Columns, Lincoln, Neb.: iUniverse, →ISBN:
glosses: The quality of being unloquacious.