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circumlocution

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English

WOTD – 30 October 2015

Etymology

From Latin circumlocūtiō (“the act of speaking around; circumlocution, periphrasis”). By surface analysis, circum- (“around”) +‎ locution (“talk”), thus "getting around (a problem) in speaking or writing". Probably a calque of Ancient Greek περίφρασις (períphrasis, “periphrasis”).

Pronunciation

Noun

circumlocution (countable and uncountable, plural circumlocutions)

  1. (uncountable) A roundabout or indirect way of speaking; thus:
    • 1553, Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique […] , page 198:
      Circumlocution is a large deſcription either to ſette forth a thyng more gorgiouſlie, or els to hyde it, if the eares cannot beare the open ſpeakyng: or when with fewe woordes we cannot open our meanyng, to ſpeake it more largely.
    • 1618, John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State.; Weight Matters in Law.; Remarkable Proceedings in Five Parliaments […] , London: Robert Boulter, page 238:
      His Majeſty leaves the choice to your ſelf, and requires from you a direct Anſwer without circumlocution or bargaining with him […]
    1. (uncountable) Unnecessary use of extra words to express an idea, such as a pleonastic phrase (sometimes driven by an attempt at emphatic clarity) or a wordy substitution (the latter driven by euphemistic intent, pedagogic intent, or sometimes loquaciousness alone).
    2. (uncountable) Necessary use of a phrase to circumvent either a vocabulary fault (of speaker or listener) or a lexical gap, either monolingually or in translation.
      A technical word, such as hyperkalemia or hypoallergenic, can be glossed for general audiences with a circumlocution, such as "high potassium level" or "less likely to cause allergies" (respectively).
      • 1997, Hansjörg Bittner, The Metrical Structure of Free Verse (PhD Thesis)‎, retrieved 21 April 2021:
        It may seem quite straightforward to render line 15 metrically regular by means of a grammatical trick: "the style as bright as soul". However, the stylistic feature of the adjectival compound does not occur in isolation but is employed again in the following line, "dem Staubfaden himmelswüst", where a grammatical circumlocution in translation would be metrically disadvantageous. Both compounds, "seelenhell" as well as "himmelswüst", should therefore be translated as compounds. When Michael Hamburger remarks that German "lends itself to the formation of compound words in a way that English does not" (in Celan 1988: 24), he probably refers to nouns such as "Türspalt" or "Algenteilchen".
      • 2010, Rebecca A. Giggs, The Rise of the Edge: New Thresholds of the Ecological Uncanny, and Inside Albatrosses (Fictions for Strange Weather) (PhD Thesis)‎, retrieved 21 April 2021:
        Linguistic horror vacui again, and lacuna: the blank part of a manuscript where the ink runs off the papyrus, and lexically the word missing from one language that must be bridged with circumlocution in translation.
  2. (countable) An instance of such usage; a roundabout expression, whether an inadvisable one or a necessary one.

Synonyms

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