Word: claptrap
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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That Lady (by Kate O'Brien; produced by Katharine Cornell) is ornate claptrap laid in 16th Century Spain and starring Katharine Cornell. The lady in question is Ana de Mendoza y de Gomez, a widowed princess who wore a patch over one eye, and her heart, to her undoing, on her sleeve. Cruel, capricious Philip II was Ana's devoted friend until she became his Secretary of State's enraptured mistress; thereafter the King, out of pique and jealousy, hounded the lovers implacably. The Secretary (Torin Thatcher) escaped at last to Aragon; Ana was kept a prisoner...
Specifically, the executive must "listen to a lot of claptrap from union stewards who are riding him, and face pressure from government officials. After that, the executive must express benign, gentle, persuasive attitudes...
Nineteen years ago, in a thundering book called Universities: American, English, German, learned Abraham Flexner, then director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N J., roundly damned U.S. colleges. With all their "wretched claptrap" of vocationalism, he held, "they resemble the modern drugstore in which the pharmacy has been pushed in the corner by soda fountains." Last week, at 82, Educator Flexner announced a modified opinion: "There must have been changes in educational methods." His reason for thinking so: for two years he had quietly been taking courses in English literature and the fine arts at Columbia...
...conversion to Roman Catholicism, in Seven Storey Mountain. And, in a category all its own, there was Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was a continuing bestseller in spite of its statistical dullness, and gave rise to more bad jokes and pseudoscientific claptrap than any book in recent years...
...tradition. Everybody quoted him as saying that he was "classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion." That would have sounded less smug if they had added, as Eliot did: "I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to claptrap; I am aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is almost worse than claptrap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with me to define." Years later he regretted that he had given "some critics the impression that...