Word: claptrap
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Revealing of the public's state of mind are the answers to the second group of questions. Republican voters declared themselves as having "had enough" of "frivolous agency spending," "controls, confusion, communism and claptrap," "Bungling at Washington, shortage, OPA etc." Some added the word, "Truman." These people wanted more of "economy in domestic spending," "honest and competent government," "more efficient organization of the reconversion program," "leadership." One woman polled put down "love," from which it is deducted she was interested intensely in peace in the broad one-world sense...
Most of the evening is devoted to conversation (a handful of good Hecht & MacArthur cracks, a hunk of fancy chatter about psychiatry and art) and to pianoplaying. Twelve-year-old Jacqueline Horner plays Chopin and Mozart with precocious skill; but the concert by no means makes up for the claptrap...
...Claptrap. In San Jose, Calif., a new electric rattrap was demonstrated: the rat walked in, the door banged shut, the machine buzzed threateningly, the door opened, the rat walked...
...last decade of their grandeur," Artist Ryder, with no faith to cling to, desperately sought to recapture his artistic vitality by painting in the Latin American jungles. Result: he became a bigger social success. "Mr. Ryder," the best critics agreed (in one of Waugh's inimitable parodies of claptrap), "rises like a young trout to the hypodermic injection of a new culture . . . focussing the frankly traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of barbarism. . . . Mr. Ryder has. found himself." But Anthony Blanche could not be fooled...
...President's plan to delegate postwar power to use U.S. armed forces without recourse to Congress. The Times's domestic arguments for Term IV Moses called "contradictory and unconvincing." The international argument, on which the Times based its qualified Roosevelt endorsement, he dismissed as "drivel . . . claptrap of the cheapest sort...