Handwave vs Null - What's the difference?
handwave | null |
(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,
* 1991 , Robert Barnard, A Scandal in Belgravia ,
A glib statement or explanation that glosses over important details.
* 2008 , Hyman P. Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy ,
(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 ,
A non-existent or empty value or set of values.
Zero]] quantity of [[expression, expressions; nothing.
Something that has no force or meaning.
(computing) the ASCII or Unicode character (), represented by a zero value, that indicates no character and is sometimes used as a string terminator.
(computing) the attribute of an entity that has no valid value.
One of the beads in nulled work.
(statistics) null hypothesis
Having no validity, "null and void"
insignificant
* 1924 , Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove :
absent or non-existent
(mathematics) of the null set
(mathematics) of or comprising a value of precisely zero
(genetics, of a mutation) causing a complete loss of gene function, amorphic.
As nouns the difference between handwave and null
is that handwave is (literally) the wave produced by a hand while null is zero, nil; the cardinal number before einn.As a verb handwave
is (rhetoric|academia) to explain something superficially, skipping over important details, perhaps appealing to intuition instead.handwave
English
Noun
(en noun)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.
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."
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
page 33,
- Some readers may wish to handwave this restriction away, thinking of as a differentiable vector field on that behaves badly at the origin; this approach will suffice for the purposes of this book.
See also
* fudge (verb) * handwavy * wave of the handnull
English
Noun
(en noun)- (Francis Bacon)
- Since no date of birth was entered for the patient, his age is null .
Adjective
(en adjective)- In proportion as we descend the social scale our snobbishness fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise.