Sunday Word: Aposiopesis
aposiopesis [ap-uh-sahy-uh-pee-sisl-kawr]
noun:
a sudden breaking off in the midst of a sentence, as if from inability or unwillingness to proceed; the leaving of a thought incomplete usually by a sudden breaking off (as in "his behavior was - but I blush to mention that")
Examples:
"I can’t even" indicates a speaker or writer is just on the verbal side of verklempt: Not too emotional to start communicating, but too emotional to finish. It is a device demonstrating the sense of being overwhelmed into silence, classified as an aposiopesis by the American Reader and, again, Slate. (Ben Guarino, 'Whatever' tops most annoying words of 2016, while a younger crowd doesn't care for 'I can’t even', The Washington Post, December 2016)
Persaud's direction seems finely calculated to unsettle, and Powell's script liberally employs aposiopesis and little revelations to force the audience to rethink their tentative grasp of what is going on (Hugh Jones, The God Committee is wonderfully unsettling, Varsity, March 2022)
The tiny/arty film movement known as 'mumblecore' has built an entire bemused worldview out of the perspective of overeducated, undermotivated twentysomething guys who can't commit to a declarative statement, let alone a career or girlfriend. (Ashish Dhakal , Remembering Nepal’s lost and the found, Nepali Times, March 2022)
Aposiopesis may be used to express speechlessness caused by great emotion or passion, such as rage, frustration, or fear. It may also be used to avoid speaking of certain topics or to direct an audience's attention to a new subject. (Literary Terms)
Origin:
rhetorical artifice wherein the speaker suddenly breaks off in the middle of a sentence, 1570s, from Latin, from Greek aposiopesis 'a becoming silent,' also 'rhetorical figure of breaking off,' from aposiopan 'become silent,' from apo 'off, away' + siope 'silence,' from PIE root swī- 'to be silent.' (Online Etymology Dictionary)
This rhetorical trick - suddenly breaking off in speech - is perhaps best illustrated by examples. One is from Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm: "'If you are acquainted with Miss Dobson, a direct invitation should be sent to her,' said the Duke. 'If you are not...' The aposiopesis was icy." Another is from P G odehouse, in The Adventures of Sally: "'So ...' said Mr Carmyle, becoming articulate, and allowed an impressive aposiopesis to take the place of the rest of the speech."
It's a way to imply something without spelling it out, while at the same time suggesting unwillingness or inability to continue, as a result of being overcome by a passion such as modesty, fear or anger.
The word is from Latin, one of that vast stock of rhetorical terms that was the backbone of political training in ancient Rome. When speech was the only way to persuade an audience, mastery of the tricks of oratory was vital. Its origins, however, lie further back, in the Greek aposiopan, be silent.
Many terms of rhetoric are hardly known today and leave us as bemused and uncomprehending as a character in Robert Silverberg's SF novel Born With the Dead:
They spoke in fragments and ellipses, in periphrastics and aposiopesis, in a style abundant in chiasmus, metonymy, meiosis, oxymoron, and zeugma; their dazzling rhetorical techniques left him baffled and uncomfortable, which beyond much doubt was their intention.
The nineteenth-century historian Lord Macaulay dismissed the need to learn such tricks and the names for them, here quoted in Trevelyan's Life: "Who ever reasoned better for having been taught the difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme? Who ever composed with greater spirit and elegance because he could define an oxymoron or an aposiopesis?" (World Wide Web)