Word: hokum
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...especially Christmas, inflame neurosis, trigger depression, accentuate loneliness. The very expectation of joy becomes a source of gloom. Adults get pressured into the hypocrisy of mingling with people they do not like and going to churches they do not believe in. Children get confused by the Santa hokum; they wind up either addicted to greed by too many presents or ridden with envy by too few. Families obliged to reassemble are rent by old grudges set to festering again. Furthermore, since Christmas dominates the marathon Thanksgiving-to-New Year's celebrations, non-Christians get painful left-out feelings...
...should know that an impressive number of intelligent and thoughtful people do not regard parapsychology as "pseudoscientific hokum...
...some extent, the public's passion for black holes is part of the faddish craze for the likes of parapsychology, the occult, UFOs, thinking plants, von Daniken and other pseudoscientific hokum. Says one astrophysicist: "For some people, black holes seem to be the Bermuda Triangles of space...
...research was painstaking, and everything, from silverware to the mating habits of the gentility, is as accurate as 1,000 hours in the library could make it. Why, then, is it that I, Claudius, which is unrestrained hokum, seems truthful, while Families, which is so much more truthful, seems like hokum? The reason is that CTW has brought everything to the series but imagination and talent. The act ing is spotty, the direction glacially slow. The characters have as much life as the figures in the dioramas at a museum of natural history, and The Best of Families...
...joyful and sassy. They have become cultural artifacts, but no amount of historical respectability can fully dim their raucous vitality. They also represent a high point. Only four or five years after they came out, Presley's music had virtually become a patented mixture of heavy breathing and hokum...