handwave

The wave of a hand.

Noun

The wave of a hand.
- 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...
- "[…]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." - 1991,...
A glib statement or explanation that glosses over important details.
- 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...

From hand + wave.

To explain something superficially, skipping over important details, perhaps appealing to intuition instead.
- Some readers may wish to handwave this restriction away, thinking of #92;tfrac#123;#92;partial#125;#123;#92;partial#92;rho#125; as a differentiable vector field on #92;mathbb#123;R#125;² that behaves badly at the...