Handwave

Full definition of handwave

Noun

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

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 $\backslash tfrac\{\backslash partial\}\{\backslash partial\backslash rho\}$ as a differentiable vector field on