wall of silence

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English

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Pronunciation

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Noun

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wall of silence (plural walls of silence)

  1. (idiomatic) Strict secretiveness maintained by the members of a group with respect to information which might be contrary to their interests, especially information concerning questionable actions by members of the group.
    • 1975 December 13, Regina Kahney, Sarah Montgomery, “Everyone's Favorite Mother”, in Gay Community News, volume 3, number 24, page 13:
      [The persecution of homosexuals in the Holocaust is] a fact deliberately buried by history. This homophobic world does not intend to let the straight world know any of the real facts. The wall of silence is deliberate.
    • 1981 August 6, “Rebel with a Cause: The real-life story of an anti-Mafia activist in Sicily makes for a handsome film with a political message”, in Time:
      That makes his struggle with the culture of omertà, the wall of silence that allowed the Mafia to prevail for decades, all the more poignant.
    • 1994 May 15, James Sterngold, “Japanese Begin to Crack the Wall Of Secrecy Around Official Acts”, in New York Times, retrieved 10 August 2012:
      Her parents sought the official report on the incident, but they have run into a wall of silence.
    • 2006 Quataert, Donald. "The Massacres of Ottoman Armenians and the Writing of Ottoman History". The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 37 (2): 249–259. doi:10.1162/jinh.2006.37.2.249. ISSN 0022-1953. JSTOR 4139548.
      After the long lapse of serious Ottomanist scholarship on the Armenian question, it now appears that the Ottomanist wall of silence is crumbling.
    • 2010 March 9, Melissa Eddy, Alessandra Rizzo, “Pope's brother: I ignored physical abuse reports”, in Businessweek, retrieved 11 August 2012:
      German justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, said Monday that a Vatican secrecy rule has played a role in a "wall of silence" surrounding sexual abuse of children.

Usage notes

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  • Although this collocation was used in late-19th- and early-20th-century literature, the precise meanings of those early usages varied. In general, the term denoted some real or figurative barrier to communication, as represented by the following examples.

Synonyms

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Derived terms

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See also

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References

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