Back-fence
adj ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Informal; armchair; carried out by people without direct knowledge or formal expertise. not-comparable, usually
"Deford indulges in the worst sort of back-fence psychologizing about how Big Bill, this marvelous athlete and star, ever got that way. Possible causes are his Irving Bieber childhood, with a dominant close-binding mother and a recessive or absent father […] and his inability to sublimate his sex drive into tennis after his glory began to fade […] Throughout the text, Tilden is treated as a totally pathological fruitcake who walked funny, smelled funny and had the social grace of a six-year-old who had to get his way."
Example
More examples"Deford indulges in the worst sort of back-fence psychologizing about how Big Bill, this marvelous athlete and star, ever got that way. Possible causes are his Irving Bieber childhood, with a dominant close-binding mother and a recessive or absent father […] and his inability to sublimate his sex drive into tennis after his glory began to fade […] Throughout the text, Tilden is treated as a totally pathological fruitcake who walked funny, smelled funny and had the social grace of a six-year-old who had to get his way."
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.