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.

1902 April 9, “Lecture at St. Stephen’s: Microbes Enjoyed by Cultured Audience”, in Wilkes-Barre Daily News, volume 23, number 123, Wilkes-Barre, Pa., page 3, column 1

Whereupon poor Elaine was so overwhelmed with embarrassment and non-plussedness that she fled with precipitate haste to Vespers . . .

1939 December 13, “O’Brien takes notes: For the Record”, in The Agnes Scott News, volume XXV, number 10, Decatur, Ga.: Agnes Scott College, page 4, column 4

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.

1978 October 11, Mac Brockman, “Acorns & Icons”, in The Hope Standard, thirty-first year, number 41, Hope, B.C., page 4

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’.

1984, Garry O’Connor, Darlings of the Gods: One Year in the Lives of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Bath: Chivers Press, published 1985, →ISBN, page 162

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.

1995 April, Kevin O’Brien, editor, Artists from Europe: Works from the Leeds European Fine Art Symposium 1994, Leeds Metropolitan University, →ISBN, page 70, column 2