Word: pseudo
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...Colin McGinn, has emerged to expose worrying weaknesses of the human psyche. The author, a prolific figure in the analytical school of philosophy, was inspired partly by Harry Frankfurt’s 2005 treatise “On Bullshit,” which scrutinized our use of another pseudo-expletive. The eponymous phenomenon is one of mental manipulation, a “rhetorical abuse or sleight-of-hand” that involves “a fundamental restructuring of outlook, often with deep emotional resonance, and frequently coupled with resistance.” McGinn intends to draw attention...
...might just be the distorted looking glass of the last 20 years, but there’s something about the 1980s and its music that brings to mind the Atlantic City casinos built in that decade. The casinos aspire to grandeur—domed, cream ceilings, great pseudo-classical columns, golden moldings—and yet are undone by the very beginning of paint peel, the first sag of the ceiling, the discolored hint of water damage from shirking on the plumbing. They might have looked good when they were first built, but they were never built to last...
Brits and pseudo-Brits, in sum, have lost this franchise. If you're a casting director looking for a voice whose very timbre communicates authority, dignity, power, you might even go to Queen Latifah before you resort to Jeremy Irons. The reasons aren't hard to speculate about. The roots of this development go back at least to the 1930s and Paul Robeson's singing "Ol' Man River" in Showboat. The therapeutic notion that suffering confers dignity and authority has spread just as the suffering of African Americans over generations has become universally acknowledged. Above all, black American ministers have...
...Medieval cathedrals, name nine. Think up a few specific examples of “contemporary decadence,” like Natalie Wood. If you can’t come up with titles, try a few sharp metaphors of your own; they at least have the solid clink of pseudo-facts...
...could go on - pseudo-scientific investigations of Klaatu that produce more glop than useful information, a failure even to reference the earlier film's famous catch phrase ("Klaatu Barada Nickto," which essentially means, "Cool it, Gort" and which was on every 12-year-old's lips a little more than a half century ago), a cross-species romance between Klaatu and an earth woman (Jennifer Connelly) that was once rather touching and now registers somewhere between fatuous and nonexistent. But why bother? Suffice it to say that these morons have, quite simply, turned The Day the Earth Stood Still...