Dictionary

slur over en · VERB

Meanings

1. (dated) To deal with something hurriedly; to treat in a perfunctory manner.
   • After his college days comes an episode which his biographers seem inclined to slur over, perhaps from a false sense of the dignity of biography, and that is the two years, from 25 April, 1841, to May, 1843, which Thoreau spent under Emerson’s roof. 1918, Archibald McKellar MacMechan, The Cambridge History of American Literature, book 2 chapter 10:
   • He took up several sheets of paper covered with writing, and began to read rapidly, slurring over the uninteresting legal terms and laying particular stress on some sentences. 1900, Leo Tolstoy, “Fanárin, the Advocate—The Petition”, in Louise Maude, transl., Resurrection: A Novel, New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, →OCLC, book I, page 177:
   • Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over. 1913, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, “The Early Married Life of the Morels”, in Sons and Lovers, London: Duckworth & Co. […], →OCLC, part I, page 6:
   • The bad points of the work are slurred over and the good ones brought out into the best light, all this through a feeling akin to that which makes it unpleasant to speak ill of one to one's face. 1846, E.A. Poe, The literati of New York, no. 1:

Forms

Synonyms

skate over · gloss over