Word: speciousness
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...bought some 7,000,000 copies of her novels in the last 20 years, it will be good and sufficient news that another literary manhole cover is rolling their way. The Sound of Thunder, book No. 18 on the Caldwell production line, has the usual assets: an inchoate style, specious profundities, embryonic character portrayal, oppressively inconsequential detail-all embossed on a favorite theme, the troubled rise of a business tycoon. About the only noncounterfeit quality of Thunder is the solid clunk it will make high on the bestseller list...
Bing, 48, is a stocky, Oxford-educated lawyer who made a name as one of Britain's most left-wing Laborite M.P.s after the war. But even before his Essex working-class constituents got fed up with his specious defenses of Communist grabs in Czechoslovakia and Korea and turned him out of office, Bing had begun commuting to West Africa to take profitable legal cases for several men later prominent in Ghana politics. By the time Ghana was set to go it alone, he was already established as an intimate adviser to Prime Minister Nkrumah, reportedly not only drafting...
Origin of Specious. In London, in the name of the staid Lord's Day Observance Society, hoaxers sent out calendars with pictures of sketchily clad young women and a verse under the January pinup...
These have been received with some jubilation. Hundreds have changed their minds about attempting physical deferment through specious illnesses. Others who had speculated on the possibilities of continuing in graduate school indefinitely are now willing to face their duty as citizens. In a word, the new military service proposal seems likely to inspire a new patriotism throughout this tired land...
...typical of American thinking that the solution to an intricate social problem would be sought in a hamburger-joint brawl, or in a Civil War. Hollywood's implied linking of Mexican social status with Negro social status is specious. But the oversimplification is revealing, because it illustrates the crudity which characterizes the "American approach" to things...