Word: humbug
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...youthful reputation as a scandalous womanizer (deserved) and as a financial charlatan (undeserved) haunted his career. All his life he was candid to the point of impudence and imprudence and maintained a totally un-Victorian intolerance of humbug and hypocrisy. His pen dripped venom. He once endowed an opponent with "the crabbed malice of a maundering witch." Justifying his casual inconsistency on an issue in Parliament, he bluntly said: "We came here for fame." When friends congratulated him on his first accession to the prime ministership, Disraeli said cynically: "Yes, I've climbed to the top of the greasy...
...American Massachusetts Institute of Technology there is by tradition a bad custom of ragging new students. It is perfectly legal for senior students to humbug the newcomers. A "school regulation" is in force whereby a student, having just entered the school, is blindfolded, taken to the suburbs, and then allowed to grope in the dark for his way home. It was in this way that a new student once fell into a hole of frozen water and got drowned. And, in the view of many senior students, this innocent boy who had lost his life "deserved it!" This bad custom...
Rabbiters & Corpses. In South and Western Australia, census takers from Humbug Scrub to Boologooroo prowled the inner edge of the Great Australian Bight in search of opal gougers, oil drillers, boundary riders and randomly wandering rabbiters. One truck driver from Adelaide was asked to deliver and collect questionnaires on the lonely "No Tree" Plain when he went out to pick up rabbits from the wandering hunters. He got five tons of rabbits and 200 questionnaires...
...dolly from the scene, I say cheers for your gear article on the swinging, switched-on city of London [April 15] and boo to all the American geese who call it humbug...
...real thunderbolts are the words, the wit, and the ever-skeptical cast of mind. Twain knew that the lies people tell themselves are much funnier than the lies they tell others. He had a bird dog's nose for humbug, and he found it everywhere-in religion, patriotism, politics, ethnic pride and national vanity. With baffled awe and unquenchable laughter, he looked upon man as the most arrogant of the apes and found him passing strange: "Man is the only animal who's got the true religion-several of 'em." Twain wonders aloud if mankind would...