masturbate
- 01 C1 Advanced
to spend time on something that makes you feel good but is actually useless or selfish.
to engage in a self-indulgent activity that serves no practical purpose or fails to achieve a meaningful goal. Used as a derogatory metaphor for unproductive work.
Simple“The director's new movie is just a way for him to masturbate his own ego.”
In context“Critics argued that the author's three-hundred-page digression was little more than intellectual masturbation, contributing nothing to the actual plot of the novel.”
UsageOften used in the form 'intellectual masturbation' or with 'ego' as an object.
Teacher's tipThis figurative use is often considered offensive or overly aggressive in formal settings; students should use it with caution.
Synonymsself indulgewaste time
A back-formation from masturbation, or else from Latin masturbātus (see -ate), past participle of masturbor. Further derivation of the Latin verb is uncertain; see masturbor for more.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.