Word: claptrap
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...very end The Honorary Consul thins and flattens down to a claptrap scene-barely suitable for framing on celluloid-in which Fortnum, Plarr and the kidnapers, led (yes) by a renegade priest named Leon, are beleaguered by police with searchlights and a helicopter. But much of the novel is as finely controlled and exquisitely melancholy as a Mozart symphony...
...least they represent an alternative to a privilege based on a discriminatory definition of journalist and an elitist notion of the professional reporter's role. White's arguments should be taken seriously, but to date they have been passed off in the press as just more reactionary claptrap from the Nixon Court. Newspapers have been content to avoid the issue of elitism, preferring to print long and sincere articles pleading "Save the First Amendment" and mobilizing their libbies in the legislatures behind the passage of "shield" laws...
With few exceptions, the critical essays that make up most of The Vonnegut Statement are founded on the rustiest claptrap in literary exegesis. Moby Dick whale imagery, phrases like "an inversion of the objective correlative" and "eschatological imperatives" constantly threaten everyone with intellectual lockjaw. For one assistant professor, the idea of Dynamic Tension in Cat's Cradle evokes Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, although Charles Atlas' muscle-building method is more in keeping with Vonnegut's unpretentious style and sources...
...amazing that anyone would buy L.B.J.'s memoirs [Nov. 8] and thereby eat the same old sanctimonious bunk and lies that have already been fed us once during the past several years. Paying for this claptrap is like paying for the Viet Nam War, which is one long, idiotic history of throwing good money after...
...with that, and with all the claptrap of the movie musical, Scrooge is a movie worth seeing-but only when there's nothing left to do on your vacation. If you've already been to Santa's Village, if you've already fed the reindeer on the Common (a pretty scrawny bunch this year), and you've bought your holly and your ivy at Xmas Tree City, take your kid sister. But first make her promise to read the book...