Word of expression for clumsy, inaccurate expressions. Asserting.
I’m seeking word or phrase useful for referring to a poor sentence which clumsily, inaccurately and ambiguously attempts to convey some idea or concept.
Bad-sentence example: “We do one multiplication of 60 of the 1010 terms to get us to 10600 and then another multiplication of 103 terms to reach 10405″ ”
Phrases incorporating’mangled’, ‘tortured ‘,’muddled’ and yet-born’ may resemble what I want, but appear overly judgmental.
Inaccurate — A phrase (from a sci.
And of me at any other math newsgroup posting by “AP (for me? A math newsgroup posting by “AP) is inaccurate or misleading in first using the “multiplication of…” infelicity one way for the (1010)60 calculation, and then a different way for the (10600)*(103) calculation. If the first case means 101060, the second might be thought to mean either (1010)(103) or (10600)(103).
Clumsy — The solecisms “a multiplication of 60 of the 1010 terms to get us to 10600” and “a multiplication of 103 terms to reach 10603” are longwinded and ambiguous ways to say “Compute 10600 as the 60th power of 1010” and “Compute 10603 as (10600)*(103)”.
I usually use obscure to refer to overly verbose sentences.
Possible options:
- confusing; abstruse
- incoherent;
inarticulate -
tongue-tied;word-bound (about a speaker and not a phrase, though) - cumbersome.
You might be looking for
solecism |su00e4lsizm, s-|
noun
a grammatical error.
Malaprop|(also malapropism)
NOUN A word in
place
of a similar sounding one, often with unintentionally amusing effect, as in, for example, dance a flamingo (instead of flamenco).
or perhaps my personal favorite
infelicity |nflsti?
( pl. pl. can you
type “embarrassing” in the best way, especially a remark or expression: She winced at their infelicities and at the clumsy way they talked.
(All citations from NOAD.)
Sorry, for messing with an earlier post, i still feel it’s appropriate as a reply to the initial query.
Try “botched”, it’s English, it’s not judgemental as to not indicating the correctness but just the way of delivering, and seldom employed, so unusual. See here: Botch:
verbinformal past tense: botched; past participle: botched 1. What’s a careless performer? “he was accused of botching the job” synonyms: bungle, do badly, do clumsily, make a mess of, mismanage, mishandle, mangle, fumble;
What are several examples of faulty statements (ahem the one that describes ‘clumsiness, inaccuracy and ambiguity’) and how,
when they are made, are they classed into two categories: stylistic vices and (logical) fallacies.
Ambiguity is well defined here (and I feel it might include inaccuracy as well).
Clumsiness on the other hand is a very vague term which can be aided by any number of stylistic vices, listed here.
Single term is a possibility, but you will have to be more precise or be satisfied with general terms such as’muddled’ that you propose yourself. If this is the course that you want to take, the kind of person you want to take, should look at synonyms of ambiguous eg.
- cryptic, dubious, enigmatic, equivocal, inconclusive, indeterminate, inexplicit, muddy, multivocal, obscure, opaque, polysemous, puzzling, questionable, tenebrous, uncertain, unclear, unintelligible, vague inaccurate
- eg. Careless, counterfactual, defective, discrepant, fallacious, false, faulty, imprecise, in error, incorrect, inexact, mistaken, off, off base, unreliable, unsound, wrong
- 1 eg. blundering, bulky, bumbling, bungling, butterfingerered, clownish, crude, elephantine, gauche, gawkish, gawky, graceless, ill-shaped, incompetent, inelegant, inept, ponderous, stumbling, unadept, uncouth, uneasy, ungainly, unhandy, unskillful, untactward, weedy out of
which it might be the safes
1 The antonyms of ‘clumsy’ are more subjective as it might be expected, since ‘clumsy’ itself is essentially less objective than the terms ‘ambiguous’ and ‘inaccurate’. If you are striving not to be perceived as judgmental, you might want to ignore them, if you are trying not to be perceived as prejudice.
How do I look at synonyms of synonyms? What is your primary term and how can you use the term (like a good
job searching or even taking class) to explain a concept?
