wink-wink

present singular third person wink-winks · participle present wink-winking · participle past wink-winked · past wink-winked

1. colloquialintransitiveTo turn a blind eye to something; to make an indirect reference to something unspoken, especially something indecent.

   Though JFK was praised as a family man—married to the most glamorous first lady of the twentieth century—the press corps and the public wink-winked throughout his presidency.

   2017, David Friend, The Naughty Nineties, Twelve Books

   1 more example

   But instead of wink-winking at the law, I think the brave and righteous thing to do is to celebrate marijuana's true and most profound medicinal quality: It makes people feel good.

   2010, Michael Konik, Reefer Gladness, page 49

plural wink-winks

1. colloquialThe act of turning a blind eye to something.

   They would normally call you and say, ‘I need A, B and C.’ Now, it’s ‘I need A, B and C, and I need you to keep it on the up and up,’ ” he said. “They’ll say, ‘I want this all done legally, and I want no wink-winks.’

   2008 August 25, Victoria Kim, quoting John [James] Nazarian, “Spotlight falls on lawyers’ ties to PIs”, in Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, Calif.: Los Angeles Times Communications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 23 May 2020

   2 more examples

   In its totality, the serial 'roid revelations over the past week have created suspicions that a system of wink-winks and pinkie swears among stars, management and agents has existed through the last minute of baseball's unpoliced steroid era.

   2005 February 15, Selena Roberts, “The Silent Treatment Is the Wrong Medicine”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 29 May 2015

   He rejected the idea that pulling down Civil War monuments was, in effect, erasing the past, “They’re an attempt to rewrite history and to essentially celebrate a false narrative about what happened during the Civil War and to send the wink-winks, the dog whistles, as we’re fond of saying today, across the generations of what the Civil War was about,” Burns explained.

   2020 June 24, Tom Tapp, “‘Civil War’ expert Ken Burns: Confederate statues should be removed”, in New York Post, New York, N.Y.: News Corp, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 02 Jul 2020