ambagitory

English

Adjective

ambagitory (comparative more ambagitory, superlative most ambagitory)

1. (obsolete) periphrastic or circumlocutory
   • 1814, Sir Walter Scott, Waverley,, page 151:

     But without further tyranny over my readers, or display of the extent of my own reading, I shall content myself with borrowing a single incident from the memorable hunting at Lude, commemorated in the ingenious Mr. Gunn’s essay on the Caledonian Harp, and so proceed in my story with all the brevity that my natural style of composition, partaking of what scholars call the periphrastic and ambagitory, and the vulgar the circumbendibus, will permit me.

   • 1826, Sir Walter Scott, Woodstock or the cavalier: a tale of the year sixteen hundred and fifty-one, Archibald Constable and Co., page 75:

     He read, long and attentively, various tedious and embarrassed letters, in which the writers, placing before him the glory of God, and the freedom and liberties of England, as their supreme ends, could not, by all the ambigatory expressions they made use of, prevent the shrewd eye of Markham Everard from seeing, that self-interest and views of ambitions were the principal moving-springs at the bottom of their plots.

   • 1841 November 14, “Useless Machinery of the Registration Bill”, in The Lancet, volume 1, page 268:

     Comment on the interpretation clause would be superfluous; its ambigatory phraseology, and all the difficulties of the subsequent registration, are the necessary result of the attempt to register the quacks with the regular practitioners of the country [...]

   • 1979 Alastair Fowler, "Genre and the Literary Canon," New Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 1, Anniversary Issue: II (Autumn, 1979), pp. 97-119

     He multiplied allusions to serious romance predecessors, introduced romantic poems and songs both as quotations and as intrafictional events, explicitly followed an "ambagitory" narrative method, and continually emphasized the romantic character of landscapes [...]