Meaning of waffliness | Babel Free

Definitions

The quality of being waffly.

uncountable

Examples

“Funny, but there’s summat of her father in her. A kind of spiritual and mental ‘waffleyness’. It’s all he had to leave and by God, poor little ’Nanda got it. It’s a sort of ‘come day, go day, God send Sunday’ attitude towards life. Whenever she didn’t want to face up to things, she shrugged her shoulders—it’s a trick that’s stuck to her all her life.”

“Not everyone could tolerate him [Kingsley Martin]. George Orwell, for example, despised his waffliness.”

“In Gunther Steincke’s Kaum einen Hauch (Scarcely Breathing) of 1991 the flautist [Pierre-Yves Artaud] drew from it a deep waffliness of tone and an occasional equivalent of the pop of a distant champagne cork.”

“Great Expectations (to get the mandatory truism down and out) has been immensely written about: George Worth had collected more than eleven hundred entries by the time he completed his great bibliography—fifteen years ago. Confronted with so much plenty, an editor is bound to display a certain waffliness.”

““In the desire to secure agreement at any cost,” she [Emma Wagner] says, “documents are sometimes inflated – and their logic distorted… foggy language helps to achieve an appearance of political consensus. But inevitably it creates problems for the future, when foggy treaties and laws have to be put into effect.” Could this be one explanation for the waffliness of this Constitution’s English?”

“If we are to be in keeping with these ideas, the Arts should have a shape and substance and should be far, far removed from the airy waffliness, the insubstantial intellectual conceits, the overdone realism, the unfocused flab of much of what characterises contemporary ‘modern’ Art.”

“New Hampshire’s governor, John Lynch, scuttled the measure, saying, “I know it’s true, but it makes my buttocks clench uncomfortably.” Wussy Democrats like that give this state its waffliness.”

“‘Where hast thou been?’ he demanded, fretfully. I steadied myself against the wall to hide my waffliness: ‘I was but yonder in the yard, sir, enjoying the sunshine: I feel so much better, today.’ […] I stood like as a statue until waffliness made me sway, whereupon Robert thrust a buffit towards me.”

“With a delight that she couldn’t hide, Miss Grenville strode towards Baby and Fingers’s cubicle with a purpose, the complete opposite to her usual vague waffliness.”

CEFR level