English

Noun

handwave ‎(plural handwaves)

1. (literally) The wave produced by a hand.
   • 1871, Archibald Forbes, My Experiences of the War Between France and Germany, Volume II, 2005 facsimile edition, Adamant Media Corporation, 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, 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, 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, page 33,

     Some readers may wish to handwave this restriction away, thinking of as a differentiable vector field on that behaves badly at the origin; this approach will suffice for the purposes of this book.

Translations

See also

• fudge (verb)
• handwavy
• wave of the hand