Word: claptrap
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Then up the street comes the horn-blowing auto parade and other claptrap of small town electioneering. A long unbreakable chain of vehicles and each is filled with happy political petty wigs, insensible to every concept of higher duty...
...past month saucer-eyed Annie has almost entirely disappeared from Cartoonist Harold Gray's strip and the adults associated with her have engaged in a riot of skulduggery. Two villains, Claude Claptrap, a popular demagog, and J. Gordon Slugg, financier, have emerged to harass Annie's foster-parent, Daddy Warbucks, who continues to be a model of industrious honesty. He has begun to market a remarkable new building material when Slugg and Claptrap rouse a mob to burn the factory and kill the inventor. That crime ruins the enterprise and Daddy Warbucks. Daddy behaves with restraint and fortitude...
...wrote as incidental music for a play by his brother-in-law. Forbidding he was, in his way. He dovetailed into no set school. His scoring seemed classical but he used short spare motifs which he often left undeveloped. His pride in his symphonies was to scorn all claptrap effects, all hints of sensationalism...
...criminal justice. There is every reason to believe that this case is conclusive enough to result in the eventual electrocution of the thugs. But there will first be the long hullabaloo of a trial, the endless appeals and decisions, and all the rest of the involved and expensive claptrap which our highly advanced civilization finds necessary in the extermination of its vermin...
...plot is hackneyed enough and all the time-honored stage tricks are used; yet in spite of this -- or perhaps because of it -- the play gets across and a fairly enjoyable evening is provided. Of course, if one gets no pleasure at all out of the conventional mystery claptrap, it will be a very dull evening indeed. But if one likes sudden shots in the dark, hands reaching out of walls, hidden panels, and so on, what Mr. Wallace has to offer is usually as good and quite often better than other plays of this type...