periphrasis

Prince Bumpo, the heir to the throne, is a mooncalf who mistakes fairy tales for real life, speaks in Elizabethan periphrasis and murmurs to himself: “If only I were a white prince!”

Literary translation is challenging, and tends to work best when the translator has recourse to the amplifying and telescoping powers of periphrasis, poetic license, and, if it comes to it, a discreet footnote here or there.

If a Prime Minister were to announce to the House of Commons, to-morrow, that the Queen had boxed his ears, it would not create a whit more amazement than if he were to say, no matter in what graceful and diplomatic periphrasis, that her Majesty was unwilling to agree to some measure which her faithful Commons desired to see passed into law.

Respecting the cause of these phenomena, the nature of the force to which, to avoid periphrasis, I have ventured to give the name of Psychic, and the correlation existing between that and the other forces of nature, it would be wrong to hazard the most vague hypothesis.

It is very odd—but if you see a remarkably modest-looking woman in Paris, you may be sure, as the periphrasis goes, that "she is no better than she should be."