Said hedges by asserting and then retracting every strong claim.

Evidence

In both his general narrative throughout the book and his treatments of various individual authors, Said has no place whatever for any Orientalist with a “determining imprint.” In a typical fashion, in what I shall refer to in Said’s case as his “touch-and-go” style of expressing his positions, he takes one step forward and one step backward when dealing with Massignon, the single figure in the book that could have achieved the supreme state of “determining imprint” but did not. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 61

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hallaq coins ‘touch-and-go style’ as a term of art for Said’s rhetorical one-step-forward-one-step-back pattern.