aperçu

plural aperçus

1. A clever or insightful distillation; an aphorism.

   President [Barack] Obama disdains sound bites, and he does not have Bill Clinton's talent for reducing the abstruse to aperçus.

   2009 February 22, Maureen Dowd, “Dark dark dark”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC

   5 more examples

   I insisted on how his opinion mattered, and developed and construed his platitudes into aperçus he was far from entertaining himself.

   1988, Alan Hollinghurst, chapter 7, in The Swimming-Pool Library, paperback edition, London: Penguin Books, →ISBN, page 143

   In this place you can go to a year's worth of dinner parties without hearing anyone quote an aperçu he first heard on Charlie Rose.

   2001 December, David Brooks, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible”, in Michael Kelly, editor, The Atlantic Monthly, Washington, D.C.: The Atlantic Monthly Group, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 04 Sep 2023

   Every so often a hobo (Mr. [Tom] Hanks again) materializes to dispense a cryptic aperçu to the boy, maybe because the child is the father of the man or because the film's envelope-pushing gobbled up most of the budget and there was only enough money for one star.

   2004 November 10, Manohla Dargis, “Do you hear sleigh bells? Nah, just Tom Hanks and some train”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 11 Aug 2023

   While we know – because the script tells us so – that the people we are watching are in love and in pain and in trouble, they never come across as more than dispensers of sparkling aperçus.

   2014 October 31, Ben Brantley, “When the head leads the heart”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 21 Jan 2023

   These paragraphs contain many freighted aperçus, formulations over which debates continue to rage, such as that ‘[t]he executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ (1.12); […]

   2022, China Miéville, chapter 3, in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, →ISBN

2. An outline or summary; also, words that summarize.