handwave

English

Alternative forms

• hand-wave

Etymology

hand +‎ wave

Noun

handwave (plural handwaves)

1. (literally) The wave of a hand.
   • 1871, Archibald Forbes, My Experiences of the War Between France and Germany, facsimile edition, volume II, Adamant Media Corporation, published 2005, page 354:

     The leader, an upright, broad-shouldered old man, with snow-white hair, half halts his horse with a handwave of salutation, as he reaches the Imperial Crown Prince, then gallops on with the latter hanging close on his flank.

   • 1991, Robert Barnard, A Scandal in Belgravia‎^[1], page 213:

     " […] In fact I tell this mob"— he gave a derogatory handwave in the direction of the ten or twelve pairs of eyes that were still intent on us—"that I was the original of these Pappa-whatsits."
     "Papparazzi."

2. A glib statement or explanation that glosses over important details.
   • 2008, Hyman P. Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy‎^[2], page 285:

     In this glib handwave by Friedman, the real results are determined independently of money and financing phenomena; given the way monetarists set up the analysis, the rate of growth of money can only affect the behavior of the price level.

Verb

handwave (third-person singular simple present handwaves, present participle handwaving, simple past and past participle handwaved)

1. (rhetoric, academia) To explain something superficially, skipping over important details, perhaps appealing to intuition instead.
   • 2001, Stephanie Frank Singer, Symmetry in Mechanics: A Gentle, Modern Introduction‎^[3], page 33:

     Some readers may wish to handwave this restriction away, thinking of ${\tfrac {\partial }{\partial \rho }}$ as a differentiable vector field on $\mathbb {R} ^{2}$ that behaves badly at the origin; this approach will suffice for the purposes of this book.

Translations

explain something superficially

• Russian: (somewhat) отмахнуться (ru) (otmaxnutʹsja)

Related terms

• hand waving
• handwaving
• handwavium
• handwavy
• wave of the hand

 

See also

• fudge (verb)
• the rest is history

 

References

• “handwave”, in Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1999–present.