Word: humbug
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Curiously, Russell's own philosophy is narrow and utterly lacking the metaphysical comfort which William James felt requisite for a creative life. "I have been painfully forced to the belief," he once remarked, "That nine-tenths of what is regarded as philosophy is humbug. The only part that is at all definite is logic, and since it is logic, it is not philosophy...
...Father, Lloyd George, by Richard Lloyd George. The son of Britain's World War I Prime Minister shows in an excellent and well-balanced biography that his famed father was not only a great man but, on occasion, a humbug as well as a lecher on a grand scale...
...book makes clear that Lloyd George, besides being a great man, also lived up to the English legend-that the Welsh are lechers and Bible bashers, musicians and bards, and, from Henry Tudor to Aneurin Bevan, have had a capacity for stirring up trouble. Lloyd George was a humbug ("a Bible-thumping pagan," is his son's phrase), something very close to a crook (the question of a political fund, most of which may have stuck in his own pocket, was never cleared up), and a sedulous seducer on a scale "unprecedented" in the history of British statesmanship...
Most analysts (959 of them in the American Association, with even more in training) have flatly and publicly denied all such charges. But whatever they preach, they have modified their practice as they have seen basic analytic principles, stripped of the ritualistic humbug, put to good use in general psychiatry, especially in brief psychotherapy and in group therapy. While last week's conventioneers droned through discussions of such topics as the "denial of envy of the phallus of God," one of the most scholarly of U.S. analysts gave a corridor summation: "When the analysts get up at conventions like...
...father insists on writing a school essay for his son. The teacher openly ridicules the effort as a piece of rhetorical bombast, gives the boy the lowest mark in the class. On tenterhooks, the proud father asks his son the grade. Tempted to deflate the stuffy old humbug, the boy lies instead and tells him that he tied for the highest mark. With subtle and touching sensitivity, Aymé indicates that the boy has taken the first important step toward manhood -to forgive one's father...