Word: claptrap
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...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...
...political leadership. Now, in the autumn of 1942, he reappears, happily leading a jumble of discontented people who find the existing administration of British affairs unendurable. The jumble is called 'Common Wealth.' . . . His intelligence is very limited and unstable. He is as imitative as a monkey, any claptrap that seems to be popular goes into his bag and any 'religious' cant, and his ambition for 'leadership' is uncontrollable...
Alarms in the Aleutians. A few U.S. newspapers and politicians fell for this claptrap, contributing to the pressure turned upon the Washington high command (see p. 25). So, perhaps unwittingly, did reports passed by local commanders and censors in the Aleutians and Alaska...