Word: speciousness
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Suddenly appearing on the scene one morning in the company of his bodyguard, a burly pugilist of no mean accomplishment, he confronted Miss Piscopo with several incoherent requests coupled with specious offers of bottled beverages. Bewildered by the curious situation, she referred him to the News Office...
...stories form the chief mental diet of many a respectable citizen, even the most avid consumers are apt to be apologetic or defiant about their appetite. But they would not admit that detectification is the lowest form of writing. They would point out that the ability to concoct a specious and readable thriller demands more ingenuity and special training than many a novelist can command. And they would further contend that the best murder stories can compete with novels on their own ground. Partisans might instance the tales of Foe, Wilkie Collins and Gaboriau, would certainly mention Dashiell Hammett, "Francis...
...spite of all temptations to take his tongue out of his cheek and go up higher, Author Stong remains at the top of his heap, lustily cock-a-doodling. At 36 he is president of the Authors Club. His latest novel. Career, pleased his friends, fooled nobody. A specious, shrewdly contrived melodrama of Iowa small-town life, Career rang all the approved changes on the old tune of the unconsidered village wise man, the turkey-gobbler-villain banker, the solid youth who will go far, and the girl with bad blood who has come far enough. It was in orchestrating...
...Blaines if she had really wanted him, but she was too much a chip of the old block to try domesticating a wanderer. Gus's evening found him unchanged as ever, hardened irrevocably in his ways. A grandfather now, with his children leaving home for the specious advantages of town, foreigners and automobiles invading his old-fashioned peace and wont, Gus was rightly reputed richest man in the countryside, but it never affected his clothes or his habits. He still worked hard, took his butter and eggs to market himself, pulled his own teeth...
...Luxe (by Louis Bromfield & John Gearon; Chester Erskin producer) is the kind of play which is so embarrassingly bad that it makes a playgoer's flesh crawl. Billed as "a play about the end of an epoch," it presents a frieze of specious, spotty and purportedly War-wrecked characters against a recent Armistice Day celebration in Paris. Rarely encountered outside the pages of bogus novels, these gloomy folk go about telling each other that they are "so tired," complaining of "the jitters," wishing they were dead. Once in a while one encourages another to "buck...