Word: spuriousness
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...named Tom Crick (Jeremy Irons) tells them why he chose history as his subject. He was in Germany at the end of World War II. The horrors he witnessed were incomprehensible to him. He could deal with them only by inserting them into historical narrative, which granted them a spurious coherence and him the distance he required to live with them...
...first beneficiary of flinging open the gates is the historical truth: amateurism has long been portrayed as part of the heritage of the ancient Greek Games. The tie with the past, though, was completely spurious. The Greeks had no concept of amateurism. For them, an Olympic competitor was a city's champion, who was supported while he trained and then was richly rewarded for his victory...
...didn't want my wisdom. He wanted a sound bite. Or, in the outmoded argot of print, a quote. Under the conventions of American journalism, his insight was worthless to him until he could get someone else to utter it, thus conferring on his nugget some spurious authority and relieving himself of any taint of opinion or bias. I could just as easily quote him to the same purpose. Someday I will...
...invents a MacGuffin, the term Alfred Hitchcock used to describe anything that gives spurious meaning to a plot, or, as Bobbo explains, "whatever got slipped into Cary Grant's pocket without his knowledge or that Jimmy Stewart picked up by mistake when the girl switched briefcases on him." The MacGuffin that Bobbo comes up with is a conspiracy to get rid of him that involves everyone from his bosses to his son's deceased Lebanese girlfriend to his limousine drivers...
...desire to dismiss the absurd and spurious charges against James O. Freedman '57, president of Dartmouth College, without retort is compelling. The fear that a single uninformed reader may believe what was quoted necessitates this response...