wooden language

noun

Etymology

Calque of French langue de bois.

Definitions

  1. Speech or writing that is overly abstract, vague, metaphorical or pretentious in order to…

    Speech or writing that is overly abstract, vague, metaphorical or pretentious in order to avoid addressing salient issues.

    • Of more consequence is the emergence of a phenomen which is perhaps peculiar to the modern world: the phenomenon which the French and Russians call “wooden language,” and which we might call, in honor of Orwell's satire, newspeak.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for wooden language. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA