flannel vs waffle

flannel

noun
  • A soft cloth material originally woven from wool, today often combined with cotton or synthetic fibers. 

  • A washcloth. 

  • Soothing, plausible untruth or half-truth; claptrap. 

  • A flannel shirt. 

adj
  • Made of flannel. 

verb
  • To flatter; to suck up to. 

  • To wrap in flannel. 

  • To waffle or prevaricate. 

  • To rub with a flannel. 

waffle

noun
  • A type of fabric woven with a honeycomb texture. 

  • In full potato waffle: a savoury flat potato cake with the same kind of grid pattern. 

  • A concrete slab used in flooring with a gridlike structure of ribs running at right angles to each other on its underside. 

  • A flat pastry pressed with a grid pattern, often eaten hot with butter and/or honey or syrup. 

  • (Often lengthy) speech or writing that is evasive or vague, or pretentious. 

  • The high-pitched sound made by a young dog; also, a muffled bark. 

verb
  • To speak or write evasively or vaguely. 

  • Of an aircraft or motor vehicle: to travel in a slow and unhurried manner. 

  • To be indecisive about something; to dither, to vacillate, to waver. 

  • To hold horizontally and rotate (one's hand) back and forth in a gesture of ambivalence or vacillation. 

  • Of a bird: to move in a side-to-side motion while descending before landing. 

  • To smash (something). 

  • Of a dog: to bark with a high pitch like a puppy, or in muffled manner. 

  • Often followed by on: to speak or write (something) at length without any clear aim or point; to ramble. 

How often have the words flannel and waffle occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )