"wooden language" meaning in English

See wooden language in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Etymology: Calque of French langue de bois. Etymology templates: {{cal|en|fr|langue de bois}} Calque of French langue de bois, {{dercat|en|pl|ru}} Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} wooden language (uncountable)
  1. (derogatory) Speech or writing that is overly abstract, vague, metaphorical or pretentious in order to avoid addressing salient issues. Wikipedia link: wooden language Tags: derogatory, uncountable Categories (topical): Language
    Sense id: en-wooden_language-en-noun-aXUKYXcq Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Download JSON data for wooden language meaning in English (2.2kB)

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      "expansion": "Calque of French langue de bois",
      "name": "cal"
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  "etymology_text": "Calque of French langue de bois.",
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        {
          "ref": "[1990, Roger Scruton, “Ideologically Speaking”, in Christopher Ricks, Leonard Michaels, editors, The State of the Language, University of California Press, page 126",
          "text": "Of more consequence is the emergence of a phenomen which is perhaps peculiar to the modern world: the phenomenon which the French and Russians call “wooden language,” and which we might call, in honor of Orwell's satire, newspeak.]",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "2022 May 20, Patrick McGuinness, “Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov review – the dangers of dwelling in the past”, in The Guardian, →ISSN",
          "text": "Life behind the iron curtain was an education in a certain kind of humour: dark, unsentimental and absurd. It understood that jokes had become shortcuts to the truth – apart from the bonus of laughter, they turned the wooden language of the regime against itself in ways that sincerity could not.",
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        "(derogatory) Speech or writing that is overly abstract, vague, metaphorical or pretentious in order to avoid addressing salient issues."
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      "wikipedia": [
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          "text": "Life behind the iron curtain was an education in a certain kind of humour: dark, unsentimental and absurd. It understood that jokes had become shortcuts to the truth – apart from the bonus of laughter, they turned the wooden language of the regime against itself in ways that sincerity could not.",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-05 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.