out-of-placeness

English

Etymology

From out of place +‎ -ness.

Noun

out-of-placeness (uncountable)

  1. The state or quality of being out of place.
    • 2003, Shuhei Hosokawa, “Speaking in the Tongue of the Antipode: Japanese Brazilian Fantasy on the Origin of Language”, in Jeffrey Lesser, editor, Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, →ISBN, page 39:
      The task of fantastic linguistics is to locate the glossophiles in the wider context of knowledge by questioning why and how they failed to construct the authentic objects of the modern linguistics. By virtue of their out-of-placeness they illuminate the limits of scientific discourse by blurring and bypassing the boundary between science and fantasy.
    • 2015 May 4, Dominick Tyler, “10 UK landscape features that you’ve probably never heard of”, in The Guardian[1]:
      During the last ice-age, massive stones were carried for miles by the scouring glaciers, only to be left, like passengers at the end of the line, when the glaciers retreated. Stranded in their new surroundings with rocks with which they share no common geology, their out-of-place-ness is evoked by their name: “erratics”.
    • 2017, Kai M. Green, “Trans* movement/trans* moment: an afterword”, in International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, volume 30, number 3, →DOI, page 321:
      Gender transgression resulted in the policing of bodies so that they were no longer able to move in and out of public space without heightened surveillance and great risk and fear of punishment. The out of place-ness of the transgender or gnc body in a hetero and cis normative society has harsh disciplinary ramifications.
    • 2019 February 26, Jonathan Jones, “Why we can’t help but see the whale in the forest as an omen”, in The Guardian[2]:
      The sheer out-of-placeness of this poor juvenile stranded in death without the sea in sight is even more disconcerting than a pod of whales washed up on a beach or a lone cetacean in the Thames.