Word: claptrap
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...Guild, producer). Unlike Poet Stephen Vincent Benét, Poet O'Neil makes no attempt to evoke the buffalo-ghost, the broncho-ghost with dollar-silver in its saddle-horn, the pure elixir, the American thing. Poet O'Neil's preachment is the sort of cheap claptrap with which a third-rate evangelist might try to impress a young folks' Bible class. That it impressed the Guild's hard-headed production committee is cause for wonder...
Leaks from the Nazi camp indicated that Leader Hitler tried to persuade the President to accept him as Chancellor chiefly by arguing that the Fascist party is now Germany's "sole bulwark against proletarianism." This argument, not mere Hitler claptrap, had strong elements of fact. Earlier in the week Dr. Paul Lobe, long considered a most moderate Socialist, Speaker of the Reichstag, with one short interlude, for twelve years (1920-32), made a pivotal speech. Seconded by other Socialist leaders, he called on the Socialist Party (Germany's second largest) to unite with the Communist Party (third largest...
...sober and ribald, to which the venal trade of publicizing has been subjected seems to have been blunted on the dullness of its target. Or possibly the public has become so habituated to the nonsensical claims by manufacturers who keep safety-pins and piston rods fresh in cellophane, that claptrap and falsehood in advertising neither arouses suspicion as to the purity and worth of the product, nor awakens resentment in the minds of the duped. If this is so no hopes can be held for any immediate change. But if the flood of periodicals mocking the accepted lies...
...have failed to plan ahead in a comprehensive way." Greatly did this speech dismay that good public friend of Governor Roosevelt's, the arch-Democratic New York Times, which declared: "Why the Governor should feel it necessary to say things which, coming from another, would be called demagogic claptrap, it is hard to understand. He does not need to go out and beat the bushes for votes. If he must speak, he ought to make sure of his facts first and then deal with them in a way not to cause his supporters to blush. . . . His speech...
...Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is now subject. After fetching talented, exciting, polished Tallulah Bankhead home from the London stage with the intention of making her a picture star, Paramount has introduced her to U. S. cinemaddicts with three of the dustiest vehicles of the year. Tarnished Lady was claptrap about a girl who married for money and later regretted it. My Sin was a routine rigmarole about a lady who tried to conceal a Central American past in a Manhattan interior decorating establishment. The Cheat is along the same lines-about a girl who loses $20,000 gambling...