TERGIVERSATION • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Tergiversation

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noun

Tergiversation n.

The act of tergiversating; a shifting; shift; subterfuge; evasion. "Writing is to be preferred before verbal conferences, as being freer from passions and tergiversations."

Fickleness of conduct; inconstancy; change. "The colonel, after all his tergiversations, lost his life in the king's service."

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Etymology of 'Tergiversation'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Tergiversation" Quotes from Famous Books

... enter these shadows. They form a part of his laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope of the thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is useless. What side of oneself does one display in evasions? the shameful side. Philosophy pursues with its glance, probes the evil, and does not permit it to escape into nothingness. In the obliteration of things which disappear, in the watching of things which vanish, ...

— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... his countenance, and charm those whom it was his interest to please. His effrontery was unconquerable: whilst conscious of the most venal motives, and even after he had displayed to the world a shameless tergiversation, he had the assurance always to claim for himself the merit of patriotism. "For my part," he said on one occasion, in conversation with his friends, "I die a ...

— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson

Words linked to "Tergiversation" : forsaking, desertion, apostasy, falsification, tergiversate, misrepresentation