armchair

noun

1. A chair with supports for the arms or elbows.

   “There were many wooden chairs for the bulk of his visitors, and two wicker arm-chairs with red cloth cushions for superior people. From the packing-cases had also emerged some Indian clubs,[…]; and all these articles[…]made a scattered and untidy decoration that Mrs. Clough assiduously dusted and greatly cherished.”

   “[W]hen he [Pooh] suddenly saw Piglet sitting in his best arm-chair, he could only stand there rubbing his head and wondering whose house he was in.”

2. (figuratively)A position removed from that which one is

   “Evaluating possible etymologies requires a significant amount of knowledge about the speakers' lived reality […] for instance, the semantic connection between some species of plant and its use in traditional medicine may be fully transparent to a native speaker, but harder to understand from the perspective of a linguist's armchair.”

adj

1. (figuratively, not-comparable)Remote from actual involvement, including a person retired from previously active involvement.

   “armchair travels”

   “These days I'm an armchair detective.”

   “Armchair tourists who are used to travelling the globe with Google Earth can now use the same technology to crawl all over the masterpieces in one of the world's most famous galleries: the Prado.”

   “My point here is not that these new armchair soldiers are to be criticized for failing in their moral responsibilities. My point is rather that while drones are to be applauded for keeping these soldiers out of harm’s way physically, we would do well to remember that they do not keep them out of harm’s way morally or psychologically.”

   “E-petitions have turned us all into armchair activists, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

2. (derogatory, figuratively, not-comparable)Unqualified or uninformed but yet giving advice, especially on technical issues, such as law, architecture, medicine, military theory, or sports; relating to such advice.

   “He's just an armchair lawyer who thinks he knows a lot about the law because he reads a legal blog.”

   “After the game, the armchair quarterbacks talked about what they would have done differently to win.”

   “If and when Ms. Cheney decides to marry, it will be interesting to see who offers best wishes, who offers armchair psychoanalysis, and who minds his own business.”

   “Judith Collins, who is New Zealand's first female defence minister, said she was appalled to see a "deeply concerning misogynistic narrative" online from "armchair admirals, people who will never have to make decisions which mean life or death for their subordinates".”

verb

1. To create based on theory or general knowledge rather than data.

   “Research for program's subject matter is like mining gold. The more raw material we have, the more likely we are going to find gold nuggets. But this step is often overlooked and a program is "armchaired" from the office of the vice-president or vice-president of sales.”

   “The very serious question is then raised as to whether reasonable and logical distractors can be "armchaired" or whether the practice of administering a question in open-end format to obtain logical distractors is a better procedure.”

   “We think it makes sense to generate interventions empirically by finding out how couples deal with conflict, rather than by armchairing interventions.”

   “MBTI has four different variables, each of which has two possible values. This could be interpreted as an implicit claim that there are four dimensions to personality, and only two types of personality within each dimension. And Myers and Briggs had no basis on which to make such a claim and just sort of armchaired it. Interpreted that way, the theory is pseudoscientific and dumb.”

2. To theorize based on analysis of data that was gathered previously; to reflect.

   “In past years, we administered this questionnaire and gave the results to the president who sat at a conference table with top management and armchaired some answers.”

   “Even before the Glasses had arrived in New Guinea, two American anthropologists at Tulane University, Ann and J. L. Fischer, had armchaired a connection between kuru and cannibalism by working their way through the findings of a team of anthropologists who had studied the Fore in the early 1950s, Ronald and Catherine Berndt, as well as the many papers on kuru that Gajdusek, Zigas and various Australian investigators had published.”