Word: claptrap
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...ORIGIN OF THE NEXT WAR -John Bakeless - Viking ($2.50). Not more than a handful of excessively well-posted people can afford to miss this book. Since it contains not a word of "war scare" claptrap, there is room upon its vivid pages for enough striking fact and comment to burst the covers off an average volume of like heft. Yet Mr. Bakeless' thesis is expressible in a few lines, which he modestly quotes from General Tasker H. Bliss...
...breath-taking scarlet robe, Miss Ethel Barrymore appeared to Mr. Walter Hampden's Shylock a creation of the role of Portia which flamed like the attack of a young and flighty tanager upon an old and steady-going raven. Mr. Hampden's performance was straightforward, stately and without elocutionary claptrap. Miss Barrymore seemed unusually nervous and selfconscious, but swept the audience off its feet with a blazing scintillant triumph in the trial scene...
This union between General Electric as a seller and so many operating service companies as buyers, effected through the Electric Bond & Share Co., has long been criticized on the grounds of monopoly. While jealousy of rival producing companies and political claptrap have played a large part in such criticism, nevertheless there has been present something of truth and justification...
...claptrap to say. "We will give you the method of science, but we will not stoop so low as to give you any science." Evidently claptrap is contagious, for since when have educators withheld the material body of knowledge from their students? Under German tutelage, universities became gristmills of fact, which ground small the meal of knowledge and then stuffed it into the puppet's head. More recently, educators have begun to recognize that the method of searching out, weighing, and using the facts which life presents to men is more important than any encyclopedia of knowledge. The ability...
...Among us politicians the quack and the trickster still flourish and the printed word is their most powerful weapon. Would that you (the publishers) adopt some schedule rates for such political advertising and would decline to publish the appeal of the liar and charlatan. Close your columns to the claptrap and buncombe of the politicians. Scorn our words when you know that we are uttering falsehoods, just as you scorn the dishonest advertiser...