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circumlocutionary love

circumlocutionary

Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Circumlocutional; roundabout; periphrastic.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Articulated in a roundabout manner; tautological or with repetitive language.
  • adjective of speech Evasive, avoiding difficult questions or key points.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

circumlocution and -ary. Originally from Latin circumlocutio, literally speaking (locutio) in a circle (circum).

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Examples

  • Kipling favours concreteness and concentration; empty abstractions and circumlocutionary descriptions are wholly absent from his works.

    Nobel Prize in Literature 1907 - Presentation Speech 1907

  • The fashionable rhetoric of philosophical liberalism is as incomprehensible to him as the flowery circumlocutionary style of an Oriental scribe would be to a keen city merchant.

    Russia Donald Mackenzie Wallace 1880

  • You will no more listen to one of the old circumlocutionary conversers than you would travel by the waggon, or make a voyage in a collier.

    Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General Charles James Lever 1839

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