handwave

The wave of a hand.

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.

"[…]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."

A glib statement or explanation that glosses over important details.

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.

To explain something superficially, skipping over important details, perhaps appealing to intuition instead.

Some readers may wish to handwave this restriction away, thinking of #92;tfrac#123;#92;partial#125;#123;#92;partial#92;rho#125; as a differentiable vector field on #92;mathbb#123;R#125;² that behaves badly at the origin; this approach will suffice for the purposes of this book.