noun

• 1mainly North American Deliberately unintelligible speech combining nonsense syllables and actual words.

  ‘Sid Caesar delivered his entire speech in double-talk French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘A true country-club hillbilly, Cornette's pompous demeanor, obnoxious jackets, and endless stream of double-talk have made him one of the most despised men in wrestling.’
  • ‘He excels at accents, impersonations, double-talk, vocal sound effects, mime, and extruded flutter-tonguing to make flutists envious.’
  • ‘I just stared at him mouth open, perplexed and maybe even slightly flustered by his strange double-talk.’
  • ‘And the finished product emerged as quite a remarkable length of double-talk.’

  1. 1.1
     another term for doublespeak
     ‘His doubletalk, fierce anger, and conspiracy theories do not register well with independents.’
     More example sentences

     • ‘Perhaps this context of guarded or duplicitous speech illumines the doubletalk on Paul's part.’
     • ‘It's political doubletalk and you can smell it a mile away.’
     • ‘It relies on doubletalk, uncertainty, lies, and keeping your opponent unsure of just how crazy you are.’
     • ‘He is the master of wedge politics, of the wolf whistle and of spin or doubletalk or should we call it ‘Newspeak’.’
     • ‘Will you blink an eye for them if the banderlats tear them to pieces or will you drown your guilt in petty self righteous doubletalk?’
     • ‘All of the rhetoric and doubletalk aside, everyone knows that the tariff was an appeasement to a few U.S. mill owners whose inferior lumber couldn't compete on a level playing field.’
     • ‘Furthermore, speech has its own structure, independent of discourse structure and sentence structure - think about the phrase-sized groupings you can hear in skilled doubletalk.’
     • ‘After more than a half hour, I realized that the discussion involved much more than the mechanics of our transport; both were using this sort of doubletalk as a means of expressing continuing distrust.’
     • ‘But beyond these forces is another that ratifies and multiplies their impact, helping produce a debate so remote from real answers and so infected with doubletalk that citizens tune out.’
     • ‘But in this exhibition you also refer to the ‘old masters’ as evidence of innovators who must speak doubletalk in order to get away with what they're trying to say.’
     • ‘And what kind of pseudoscience doubletalk do you suppose they trot out to explain this policy?’
     • ‘They hide their lies in doubletalk, manipulating our English language to serve their own ends.’
     • ‘The administration has sought to minimize the damage with a barrage of doubletalk that even the subservient media has been unable to swallow.’
     • ‘I'm not thick, I'm not naive - I'm just sick of theory and doubletalk.’
     • ‘This nation is tired of doubletalk, of deliberate confusion, and of unseemly haste.’
     • ‘Until this cycle of excuses and doubletalk ends, the rest of us won't be able to separate the good from the bad.’
     • ‘This double-talk has shown us a lack of leadership and an inability to implement strategies for quality of life and a sustainable infrastructure.’
     • ‘In a country with proper respect for its rights and freedoms, this should not be a subject distorted by hyperbole nor confused by double-talk.’
     • ‘Not surprisingly, this attempt to square the circle involved a large dose of hypocrisy and double-talk.’