The interview aftermath and the E.R. (p. 17)
wanting gurneyside Q&A, etiology and diagnosis by Socratic method, ordered and point-by-point. There are, by the O.E.D. VI’s count, nineteen nonarchaic synonyms for unresponsive, of which nine are Latinate and four Saxonic.
Context
Hal strapped to a gurney outside the admissions building, forecasting the Emergency Room to come: some blue-jawed M.D. will want ordered Socratic Q&A, and Hal — mute, about to be catalogued as unresponsive — responds by lexicographing his own catatonia, sorting the synonyms for what he'll be called into Latinate and Saxonic columns. The theme's central irony in one sentence: the mind running at full spec inside a body that can't produce a single acceptable word.