Word: claptraps
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...Soviet satellites, but I did get a glimpse of a new breed of apparatchik. The press department of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry arranged an interview with a 34-year-old Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade named Andrei Lukanov. He spoke idiomatic English, kept the party-line claptrap to a merciful minimum and talked candidly about the "shortcomings" of a command economy and even about the need to look for "a synthesis between Marx and the market...
...Pudding show is nothing but scatological, sexist claptrap. Done well, the offensive nature of the production is washed away with an endless stream of giggles. If you keep 'em laughing, there's no time to reflect on the preposterous, even revolting ethos...
...mass that may once have been a theme or plot twist now rendered unrecognizable by incompetent writing. Sweettable is talking-head drama of the worst sort, in which portentous declamations about the feel of people's thighs, memories of blue centaurs, the lips of doom and similar psycho-symbolic claptrap gets tossed willy-nilly at a justifiably mystified audience...
GILLETTE IS NOT the only lost, at the Hasty Pudding this month. Claptrap, the other one of two new comedies mounted by the ART this month, biographies the wacked-out encounter of an incompetent actor with an inept author. American theater is fascinated with losers; with the exception of musical comedy, most original plays seem to have spring from the forehead of Willy Loman...
...Donne's words merely a "right" thing to say, then, a slice of holy claptrap dished out at the Christmas season? What does it mean to believe that any man's death diminishes me? In what sense, diminishes? And even if one wholeheartedly accepted Donne's idea, what then? What use could one possibly make of so complete an act of sympathy, particularly when apprised of the deaths of total strangers...