the.com/periphrasis
Using twenty words to avoid the five you actually mean.
means A roundabout way of saying something, using extra words instead of the one plain word that would do.
from From Greek periphrasis, built from peri- ('around') and phrazein ('to say, to point out') — literally 'speaking around' something. It entered English through classical rhetoric, where grammarians used it as a technical term for substituting a descriptive phrase for a single word (saying 'the one who sits on the throne' instead of 'king'). Related to our word 'paraphrase,' which comes from the same phrazein root but with a different prefix.
- origin
- Greek for speaking around something
- politician's dialect
- let go instead of fired
- opposite move
- the bluntness of plain speech
- sneaky use
- sounds formal, often just stalling