Gulliver’s Travels vocabulary

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circumlocution

help with synonyms synonyms: periphrasis, ambage, tautology, pleonasm, circumambulation, circumbendibus ???

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Definition:
the use of many words in a deliberate attempt to be evasive

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Uses:
It put me to the pains of many circumlocutions, to give my master a right idea of what I spoke; for their language does not abound in variety of words, because their wants and passions are fewer than among us. But it is impossible to express his noble resentment at our savage treatment of the Houyhnhnm race; particularly after I had explained the manner and use of castrating horses among us, to hinder them from propagating their kind, and to render them more servile.

Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels Into Several Remote Regions of the World (1726)
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I gave up and put the matter baldly; I was much too tired for delicacy or circumlocutions.

Diana Gabaldon. Outlander (1991)
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Modern Philosophers, to avoyd Circumlocutions, call that Instrument, wherein a Cylinder of Quicksilver, of between 28. and 31. Inches in Altitude, is kept suspended after the manner of the Torricellian Experiment, a Barometer or Baroscope, first made publick by that Noble Searcher of Nature, Mr. Boyle, and imployed by Him and others, to detect all the minut variations in the Pressure and weight of the Air.

The Royal Society. Philosophical Transactions: Giving Some Accompt of the Present Undertakings, Studies,and Labours of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World, volume I (1666)
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She did not, however, put any very great pressure upon my grandmother’s sisters, for they, in their horror of vulgarity, had brought to such a fine art the concealment of a personal allusion in a wealth of ingenious circumlocution, that it would often pass unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed.

Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time [volume 1]
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