Inexpressibility - Definition and Examples in Rhetoric

Inexpressibility s in Rhetoric Definition In rhetoric, inexpressibility refers to a speakers inability to find or use the appropriate words to describe a situation or relate an experience. Also called the inexpressibility trope or inexpressibility topos. Inexpressibility may be regarded as one of the tropes of silence or as adynatona type of hyperbole that emphasizes a subject by stating the impossibility of describing it. Examples and Observations Shakespeare himself couldn’t come up with the right words to describe the scene at the Staples Center Thursday night. It was a disaster moviefor the Los Angeles Lakersplaying out before our eyes on TNT. A proud franchise falling in epic fashion at the hands of the former doormat franchise that has existed in the Lakers’ shadow all these years.(Sekou Smith, Twitter Reacts: The Lakers Worst Loss Ever . . . and the Clips Biggest Win Ever. Sekou Smiths Hang Time Blog, March 7, 2014)Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter.(Goneril in Act One, scene one of The Tragedy of King Lear by William Shakespeare)I do not err in conceiving that you are interested in details of all that is majestic or beautiful in nature; but how shall I describe to you the scenes by which I am now surrounded? To exhaust the epithets which express the astonishment and the admirationthe very excess of satisfied astonishment, where expectation scarcely acknowledged any boundary, is this, to i mpress upon your mind the images which fill mine now, even till it overflow?(Percy Bysshe Shelley in a letter to Thomas Love Peacock, Mont Blanc, July 22, 1816) Dantes Use of the Inexpressibility Trope If I had words grating and crude enough that really could describe this horrid hole supporting the converging weight of Hell, I could squeeze out the juice of my memories to the last drop. But I dont have these words, and so I am reluctant to begin. (Dante Alighieri, Canto 32 of The Divine Comedy: Inferno, trans. by Mark Musa. Indiana University Press, 1971) But if my verse would have a defect When entering into the praise of her, For that is to blame the weak intellect And our speech, that does not have the power Of spelling out all that Love says. (Dante Alighieri, Convivio [The Banquet], c. 1307, trans. by Albert Spaulding Cook in The Reach of Poetry. Purdue University Press, 1995) Inexpressibility in the Lyrics of Cat Stevens How can I tell you that I love you, I love you But I cant think of right words to say. I long to tell you that Im always thinking of you, Im always thinking of you, but my words Just blow away, just blow away. (Cat Stevens, How Can I Tell You. Teaser and the Firecat, 1971) There are no words I can use Because the meaning still leaves for you to choose, And I couldnt stand to let them be abused, by you. (Cat Stevens, The Foreigner Suite. Foreigner, 1973) Inexpressibility From Homer to Wes Anderson You might say The Grand Budapest Hotel is one big example of the device that rhetoricians call the inexpressibility trope. The Greeks knew this figure of speech through Homer: I could not relate the multitude [of the Achaeans] nor name them, not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths. The Jews know it, too, through an ancient part of their liturgy: Were our mouths as full of song as the sea, and the joy of our tongues as countless as the waves . . . we still could not give thanks enough. And, needless to say, Shakespeare knew it, or at least Bottom did: The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive nor his heart to report what my dream was.† Anderson’s goofy dream is of course closest to Bottom’s version of inexpressibility. With great panache and an almost imperceptible wink, he serves up witty confections of sets, costumes and acting that are as deliberately mismatched to the terrors of this history as is Zero to Gustave. This is the film’s ultimate incongruity, meant to amuse and touch you while keeping Anderson honest about his firsthand ignorance of fascism, war and a half-century of Soviet dreadfulness. (Stuart Klawans, Missing Pictures. The Nation, March 31, 2014) Inexpressibility Topoi The root of the topoi to which I have given the above name is emphasis upon inability to cope with the subject. From the time of Homer onwards, there are examples in all ages. In panegyric, the orator finds no words which can fitly praise the person celebrated. This is a standard topos in the eulogy of rulers (basilikos logos). From this beginning the topos already ramifies in Antiquity: Homer and Orpheus and others too would fail, did they attempt to praise him. The Middle Ages, in turn, multiplies the names of famous authors who would be unequal to the subject. Included among the inexpressibility topoi is the authors assurance that he sets down only a small part of what he has to say (pauca e multis). (Ernst Robert Curtius, Poetry and Rhetoric. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. by Willard Trask. Princeton University Press, 1953) Also See Apophasis  and  Paralepsis AposiopesisEmphasisFigures, Tropes, and Other Rhetorical TermsOccultatioTopoiVerbal Irony

Be a Ruthless Editor

Be a Ruthless Editor Be a Ruthless Editor Be a Ruthless Editor By Michael Hard rules are a good thing for writers sometimes. The sonnet is one of the strictest forms of poetry, but some of the worlds greatest poems are sonnets. A haiku form is even stricter, seventeen syllables in three lines. Hard word counts force a writer to overcome his or her natural laziness by editing ruthlessly. Because writers have no choice but to keep on ruthlessly editing and shortening until the piece is short enough, their job becomes easier, paradoxically. With fewer choices, decision-making becomes faster. There is only room to make one main point, and once you decide what it is, theres no need to struggle to fit any others in. Tighten Your Writing Ruthless editing becomes a necessary skill because some short writing opportunities have very hard word count limits. For example, each of my monthly allotment of academic journal abstracts could never exceed 150 words, After I completed them, they were loaded into a searchable database your local library may have a subscription to it. The database included fields for the author, title and publication, each with limited lengths, but the abstract field in the database could only hold 150 words. So I had to keep editing and reediting until my abstract was less than 150 words. It was a hard rule that could not be broken. Builders talk about load-bearing walls. When youre remodeling your house, if you want to open up the floor plan or provide more space, maybe you decide to remove a wall. Thats fine, unless the wall is a load-bearing wall. If you remove a load-bearing wall, part of the building will fall down. As you remove sentences or words, parts of the sentence or paragraph that used to be cosmetic become load-bearing. This is a good thing: it makes you pay more attention to what youre writing. It requires your writing to be more efficient. And that makes your writing easier to read, because there is less fluff to read through, and it makes your writing more powerful. Ruthless editing can lead to honest evaluation. Summarizing your work in a shorter form, as in a pitch letter or synopsis, provides you a reality check on what you wrote. If you cant briefly present your work without sounding ridiculous, maybe (I gently suggest) maybe it is ridiculous. Help the Reader Besides the invigorating, astringent benefits to the writer learning to edit ruthlessly, brief writing benefits the reader too. The human mind can only hold so many thoughts and words at once, just as a computer screen or the page of a book can only hold so many words. So for example, academic researchers need abstracts to be brief so that several can be compared on a single page or computer screen. Short summaries let readers get a taste of the writers ideas or many writers ideas in a small space and time. By limiting the number of ideas in the summary, the writer also limits the number of ideas that need to fit into the readers head at one time. With fewer ideas to focus on, the reader has more room to think about them. With fewer words to move around in your head, words can be moved around more easily, compared, pondered and felt. Which is more effective: a single powerful, precise word or a string of twenty words that mean exactly the same thing and add nothing more? Here are some tips for editing ruthlessly: Cut Riskily Set a goal for yourself, if your editor hasnt already, to cut 10% from your draft. But why stop there? Choose a paragraph and cut out one-fourth. Or take a risk, let the adrenaline flow and cut it down one-half. Youll be surprised at how often the passage still works. (Often it wont thats why its called a risk.) If it doesnt work, simply restore the cut passage from your recently saved draft. Some reasons why such ruthless cutting often works: You may find you had more fluff than you thought. The passage still works because the cut part never did. You may find that the cut part wasnt as necessary as you thought. Only when its gone do you realize you can live without it. It was pulling some weight, but not so much. If you want, take the best words from it, use them elsewhere, and move on. You may find that your reader doesnt need the cut part to figure out whats happening. When a character leaves the room, your reader will assume the character went through a door without being explicitly told. Make Less More Even if I increase it to 1,000 or 100,000 words, I still cant improve on the classic six-word-novel: For sale: baby shoes, never worn No one is saying that War and Peace would be improved if it were edited down from 587,287 words to 1,000 words. If you want to deal with five families and the Napoleonic War, you will need a lot of words. But a key to ruthless editing and having the heart to do it in the first place is being able to see when you have gained more than youve lost by cutting words. Maximize Your Space If you have a limited number of words to work with, make each word carry its weight. For example: The river flowed through the river bed, making a sound like thunder. We can cut some of those words without losing any meaning. Rivers always flow, usually through river beds, and thunder is always a sound. Changing it to The river thundered or The thundering river says as much in three words as the original sentence did in eleven really, it says more. Now I have to find a new, sleek sentence to put them into. It will take a little work to make the most of them, just as it takes a little work to make the most of the garlic chives I just harvested from my garden. But should I give up a good thing because it takes work? Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? 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