Timeline for How to say "handwaving" in Russian?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
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| Oct 24, 2012 at 15:03 | comment | added | farfareast | @KCd: рукомашество will only work in conversation with people who are somewhat bilingual(Russian,English) - not with general scientific public. You can of course argue that they all have to be somewhat bilingual in our globalization time. :-) In my time in university we would use "в этом месте доказательство недостаточно чистое" to say that some assumptions requiring their own proving are given as if they are proven and further steps are based on them. | |
| Oct 24, 2012 at 6:04 | comment | added | KCd | @farfareast: I understand what you mean, but people in Russia last summer told me that a one-word translation that is used is рукомашество (I added this comment to my question several months ago). | |
| Oct 24, 2012 at 3:29 | comment | added | farfareast | @KCd: In this meaning of word handwaving that you describe I would use in Russian: здесь доказательство недостаточно чистое. | |
| Jul 11, 2012 at 17:46 | comment | added | KCd | I suppose неформальный is essentially the same as "informal", which is roughly the same as handwaving, but in English we nevertheless have the separate terms "informal" and "handwaving", and I figured in Russian there should be something corresponding to "handwaving" just as неформальный is like informal. | |
| Jul 11, 2012 at 14:05 | comment | added | Armen Tsirunyan | небрежный means sloppy rather than sketchy | |
| Jul 11, 2012 at 14:01 | comment | added | Alexander Serebrenik | Небрежный sounds more negative than неформальный | |
| Jul 11, 2012 at 13:41 | comment | added | Olga | неформальное доказательство is a proof without details, when, for example, you don't solve equations or don't prove auxiliary lemmata. | |
| Jul 11, 2012 at 13:33 | comment | added | Olga | How do you like неформальный? | |
| Jul 11, 2012 at 12:07 | comment | added | Olga | OK, so is it something like "sketchy" or "too general"? | |
| Jul 11, 2012 at 12:00 | comment | added | KCd | I didn't meant that the argument is actually wrong in its conclusions, or suspected to lead to something that is false, but that certain levels of detail are swept under the rug. The word небрежный (careless) is good to know, though, and I hadn't seen that before. | |
| Jul 11, 2012 at 11:44 | comment | added | Olga | Oh I see. You can refer to this as неаккуратный or небрежный. This would mean something like "because there are so many things that look messy or are not taken care of, it is probable that there is a mistake". | |
| Jul 11, 2012 at 11:35 | comment | added | KCd | Thank you, but this isn't the sense of handwaving (in debate or work) that I had in mind, but rather a kind of informal argument that a physicist might use where, say, the order of some iterated integral is reversed or a limit is passed from outside to inside a summation without caring about whether the techniques are really justified (sorry if the description of the handwaving I intended sounds technical). | |
| Jul 11, 2012 at 11:01 | history | edited | Olga | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 11, 2012 at 8:06 | history | edited | Olga | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 11, 2012 at 7:58 | history | answered | Olga | CC BY-SA 3.0 |