meaning of handwave
1. handwave [possibly from gestures characteristic of stage magicians] To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener; to support a possibly actually valid point with blatantly faulty logic. If someone starts a sentence with "Clearly. . . " or "Obviously. . . " or "It is self-evident that. . . ", it is a good bet he is about to handwave alternatively, use of these constructions in a sarcastic tone before a paraphrase of someone elses argument suggests that it is a handwave. The theory behind this term is that if you wave your hands at the right moment, the listener may be sufficiently distracted to not notice that what you have said is wrong. Failing that, if a listener does object, you might try to dismiss the objection with a wave of your hand. The use of this word is often accompanied by gestures: both hands up, palms forward, swinging the hands in a vertical plane pivoting at the elbows and/or shoulders depending on the magnitude of the handwave; alternatively, holding the forearms in one position while rotating the hands at the wrist to make them flutter. In context, the gestures alone can suffice as a remark; if a speaker makes an outrageously unsupported assumption, you might simply wave your hands in this way, as an accusation, far more eloquent than words could express, that his logic is faulty. [Jargon File] hang 1. To wait for an event that will never occur. "The system is hanging because it cant read from the crashed drive". See wedged, hung. 2. To wait for some event to occur; to hang around until something happens. "The program displays a menu and then hangs until you type a character. " Compare block. 3. To attach a peripheral device, especially in the construction "hang off": "Were going to hang another tape drive off the file server. " Implies a device attached with cables, rather than something that is strictly inside the machines chassis. hanja Han characters Hanoi Towers of Hanoi Han Unification Han character hanzi Han characters happily Of software, used to emphasise that a program is unaware of some important fact about its environment, either because it has been fooled into believing a lie, or because it doesnt care. The sense of "happy" here is not that of elation, but rather that of blissful ignorance. "The program continues to run, happily unaware that its output is going to /dev/null. " [Jargon File] Happy
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