I see what Carson is getting at here, but honestly the example confuses me a bit. The word cliche is used in its original French form because it's easier to understand the meaning that way, perhaps, but it's not like the word "cliche" is completely untranslatable. The word itself has no direct translation, but if you look up synonyms for the word, you find things like "commonplace" or "overworked phrase". You can still describe what "cliche" is in English or define the word. So I feel that this example is a bit different than the other that she uses for metaphysical silence. MOLY is literally untranslatable because we are not given a translation. This feels like true metaphysical silence, because there is no meaning attached to the word whatsoever. We can read the sentence that it's in a million times and still come no closer to knowing what MOLY exactly is. Maybe this was Carson's point - or maybe I'm just not one hundred percent understanding what metaphysical silence is. Can you think of any other words in the English language that are "untranslatable" or that we use the original foreign term for?

This line makes me wonder - how long does a piece of literature have to influence people to be considered a "classic"? Typically, we think of older works as classics because they've stuck with society for so long. So how can we predict that a piece will become a classic? Who defines it as such?