Unloquaciousness

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’.

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.

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.”

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.

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.