Word: hoax
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...gave a clue to his state of mind: 1) the Turkish government announced that Grigor had decided to quit his post and move to Switzerland; 2) the Rumanian embassy announced that he had died of eating poisoned mushrooms; 3) the Rumanian embassy announced that its first announcement was a hoax to get even with the Turks for their announcement, and 4) Grigor himself announced that all former announcements were greatly exaggerated...
...letter as an example of growing anti-Soviet feeling. London's less credulous News Review checked up, found that there was no Selhurst School, never had been. H. Rochester Sneath turned out to be two Cambridge undergraduates who had invested $1.60 in letterheads to perpetrate the best hoax of the spring...
...Though far from the best hoax in university history. Cantabrigians would rank higher the fictitious Sultan of Zanzibar (the late William Horace de Vere Cole, brother-in-law of former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain), who, in 1910, bamboozled the Vice Chancellor into entertaining him at tea. The record at Oxford appears to belong to "George Psalmanazar" (real name unknown), who palmed himself off, in 1704, as an authority on the language of Formosa, published a fake Formosan geography and history, taught at Oxford for six months, was not exposed until four years later...
...final volume, H. L. Mencken has had his say on the peculiarities of U.S. speech. The final volume, like its predecessors, is a vast miscellany, ill-arranged, bulging at the seams with inconsequential information, festooned with footnotes in such profusion as to give it the appearance of a gigantic hoax. Its elaborate cross references sometimes seem soberly professorial, sometimes like parodies on scholarship. The whole work now runs to 2,880 pages. It is surely one of the great curiosities of literature...
Into the record went Henry's written polemic of 11,000 words, while, with Running Mate Glen Taylor at his side, he read abstracts from it. The Marshall Plan, he said, was a "blueprint" for war, a "colossal hoax" on the people of the U.S., and would "impose Washington and Wall Street intervention in the internal affairs of the participating countries." He had a counter proposal: the U.S. should give $50 billion to the United Nations to be spent for relief over the next ten years...