Why “circumambages” is a great word
Circumambages is the practice of using unnecessarily roundabout or evasive language. Formed within English by derivation from the prefix *circum-* (meaning "around") and the noun *ambage* (meaning "circuitous or indirect language"), itself from Latin *ambages* ("windings, circumlocutions"). Unlike "brevity," which values concision, or "periphrasis," which denotes a single roundabout phrase, circumambages refers to the habitual and wearying accumulation of verbal evasion. It is the politician's spiraling answer that never arrives, the bureaucrat's memo that buries its point beneath strata of qualifying clauses, the lover's elaborate detours around a simple admission of need—the architecture of language built not to reveal, but to protect, exhausting, conspicuous, and somehow more revealing than the truth it conceals.