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If you call someone mealy-mouthed, you mean they will not say the hard thing straight. They hide behind soft, careful, or polite words; they talk around the point. You use it to show : the speaker is not brave enough, or not honest enough, to be clear. A mealy-mouthed politician avoids the real answer. A mealy-mouthed apology never quite admits the fault. It is a criticism of character, not a remark about food. The word is a little old-fashioned but still alive in news and argument. It is never a compliment. a blow to be kind is different; mealy-mouthed is what we say when the softness looks like fear or slippery talk.
說話拐彎抹角、不敢直言（帶貶義）
組成mealy + mouthed. Possibly from German Mehl im Maule behalten (“to keep flour in the mouth”), a saying Martin Luther used: with flour in your mouth you cannot speak cleanly. In English, mealy is the “like flour” sense.
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
mealy-mouthedadj
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Prone to speaking evasively, indirectly, or duplicitously; not forthright.
- The surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of his woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, is better than the mealy-mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature.
- The editors engage in mealy-mouthed apologetics, setting up Orthodox Jews as agents of gentrification, yet they fail to note that it is not white hipsters being beaten but longtime residents of Williamsburg and Crown Heights.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。