The cultural theorist Sianne Ngai suggests that, when shocked or grieving, we find ourselves able to speak of the experience only in ‘thick speech’. When speaking thickly, Ngai says, we are challenged in our usual ability to ‘interpret or respond’. A drastic slowdown and recursion of language occurs, a rhetorical enactment of fatigue and confusion. Tenses work against one another. There is a ‘backflowing’, a loss of causal drive, a gathering of hesitancies and stutters. We speak an eddying speech, cloyed to the point of congealing.
