slur over
English edit
Verb edit
slur over (third-person singular simple present slurs over, present participle slurring over, simple past and past participle slurred over)
- (dated) To deal with something hurriedly; to treat in a perfunctory manner.
- 1846, E.A. Poe, The literati of New York, no. 1:
- The bad points of the work are slurred over and the good ones brought out into the best light, all this through a feeling akin to that which makes it unpleasant to speak ill of one to one's face.
- 1900, Leo Tolstoy, “Fanárin, the Advocate—The Petition”, in Louise Maude, transl., Resurrection: A Novel, New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, →OCLC, book I, page 177:
- He took up several sheets of paper covered with writing, and began to read rapidly, slurring over the uninteresting legal terms and laying particular stress on some sentences.
- 1913, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, “The Early Married Life of the Morels”, in Sons and Lovers, London: Duckworth & Co. […], →OCLC, part I, page 6:
- Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.
- 1918, Archibald McKellar MacMechan, The Cambridge History of American Literature, book 2 chapter 10:
- After his college days comes an episode which his biographers seem inclined to slur over, perhaps from a false sense of the dignity of biography, and that is the two years, from 25 April, 1841, to May, 1843, which Thoreau spent under Emerson’s roof.