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Word: humbug (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
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Usage:

...rule which provides that a word or phrase once officially banned in parliamentary debate cannot be used again. As a result, no M.P. can call another a bonehead, windbag, twister or underfed dwarf, say he lacks guts or intestinal fortitude, describe his speech as ballyhoo, cant and humbug, or cheap and nasty...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: NEW ZEALAND: Piffle | 12/10/1951 | See Source »

...blush for you and your "G.B.S." feature. For the first time in my years of reading TIME, I was unable to finish an article. The author, may he always be nameless, is a diddler in humbug...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Letters, Dec. 4, 1950 | 12/4/1950 | See Source »

...that they were no more than walking arguments. This is a half-truth, though it is a fact that Shaw did not believe in character for its own sake. Few Victorian writers did. His eye for the middle-class milieu was perfect. He knew exactly the values beneath the humbug and was only rash in assuming that men and women can live without it. Candida is an excellent portrait of a woman and so is the delightful Major Barbara. The theater, and comedy above all, has always dealt in types; the sentimental Englishman and the disillusioned Irishman in John Bull...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: War: G.B.S.: 1856-1950 | 11/13/1950 | See Source »

After fanaticism, Orwell attacks intellectual humbug. In Politics and the English Language he excoriates the light-fingered journalists, heavy-handed politicos and potato-mouthed bureaucrats who, through carelessness or snobbery, are maiming the English language. In The Prevention of Literature he baits, hooks and dries the doublethink Communist intellectuals. Unlike most American criticism, which is written in a weird graduate school code, Orwell's literary essays are directed, without condescension or pedantry, to the non-expert who reads for pleasure...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Guerrilla | 11/13/1950 | See Source »

...psychoanalysis a cure-all for the minor ills of the mind? Or is it a costly fad full of humbug? Few healing techniques of modern times are fought over with such violent partisanship as the long-drawn-out Freudian analysis. For the past fortnight, a layman and two prominent psychiatrists have carried on the argument in the Nation...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Medicine: The Couch Cult | 9/11/1950 | See Source »

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