(n.) One who prates much in his own favor, and makes unwarrantable pretensions; a quack; an impostor; an empiric; a mountebank.
Example Sentences:
(1) "This crowd of charlatans ... look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalise that the science is entirely compromised."
(2) That shameless charlatan is always stealing my best lines ... usually before I think of them.
(3) For every cinephile that delights in Quentin Tarantino's penchant for opulent dialogue and magpie film-historian's eye, there's another who sees the US director of Reservoir Dogs , Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill movies as a garish charlatan who survives on a habit of plundering the past.
(4) Firstly because it's a guess from a self-confessed non-scientist (I won't accept charlatan, sorry NeverMindTheBollocks).
(5) When you look at the scientific studies carried out on people trying to lose weight, it's hard not to think that all the blockbuster diet gurus are charlatans – if not, one can only assume that they are incredibly hopeful and optimistic people.
(6) Well, we didn't need the debt crisis to learn that impending doom – Greeks have been living for over a year with a default hanging over their heads – creates a perfect market for charlatans.
(7) There are bad days, increasingly so for them, but then there are days like this that break new boundaries of cataclysmic play and make those of us who predicted a close series seem like end-of-the-pier charlatan soothsayers.
(8) "Now," he says bitterly, "if you research my name on the internet, after the first few items you find I'm a charlatan.
(9) What is the ingredient the rest of the time, you knife-wielding charlatan?” Brand asks.
(10) Ukip is a party of con artists, myth peddlers, charlatans and professional shysters.
(11) When this billionaire plutocrat charlatan – who poses as a man of the people as he enriches himself at their expense – implements a $5.5tn cut that shamelessly shovels money into the pockets of affluent and wealthy Americans, he should be resisted.
(12) Nick Coyle casts his audience as visitors to a meditation class, with the Aussie comic in character as a guru-cum-charlatan wearing a scented candle on his head.
(13) Hillmer's charlatanism was proven by the Medical Chancellery at Petersburg when he visited Russia in 1751.
(14) In 1751 the oculist Joseph Hillmer was expelled as charlatan from Petersburg by an expert opinion, which was founded on 125 case reports on his Russian clients, amongst them 60 suffering from cataracts, which had been couched on 80 eyes.
(15) Yet still we trust these charlatans with our money.
(16) 6.02pm BST My verdict One commenter said today that any answer to this question other than "we need to wait and see" would be no better than the work of a "non-science charlatan".
(17) Health workers with secondary qualification and those who graduated from colleges of medicine also commit charlatanism if their healing activity is out of their professional competence.
(18) When a physician performs unprofessional activity breaking the rules of his profession, which is colloquially interpreted as charlatanism, the term "malpractice" is used.
(19) The Charlatans frontman, Tim Burgess, stepped in to present her 10am slot.
(20) A by no means exhaustive list of his political interventions includes: health – he forced ministers to listen to his gormless support for homeopathic treatments and every other variety of charlatanism and quackery; defence – he protested against cuts in the armed forces; justice – he complained about ordinary people’s access to law, or as he put it: “I dread the very real and growing prospect of an American-style personal injury culture”; political correctness – he opposes equality as I suppose a true royal must; GM foods – he thinks they’re dangerous, regardless of evidence; modern architecture – he’s against; and eco-towns – he’s for, as long as he has a say in their design.
Dilettante
Definition:
(v. t.) An admirer or lover of the fine arts; popularly, an amateur; especially, one who follows an art or a branch of knowledge, desultorily, or for amusement only.
Example Sentences:
(1) As if to prove her silly dilettantism, when a journalist asked Dasha about her favourite artists, she replied, "I'm, like, really bad at remembering names."
(2) No dilettante side-project of the idle millionaire rock star, this.
(3) Those who have worked closely with the foreign secretary in the past say his ego is more fragile than it can appear, and he is sensitive to the accusation of being a political dilettante.
(4) In the reality of the early 1960s, he was the wealthy playboy-dilettante secretary of state for war who almost destroyed Harold Macmillan's Conservative government by the discovery of his dalliance with the dancer and call-girl Christine Keeler, who was also said to be sleeping with the Soviet naval attaché Evegeny Ivanov.
(5) An open recognition of the problems in the psychoanalytic study of literature should serve to minimize dilettantism and raise the level of scholarship.
(6) In 1666, he's angry about the smug dilettantism of the courtly elite, and the appalling arse-licking conformity that even his closest friend indulges in.
(7) And Vronsky’s own dilettante-ish attempt to paint Anna is abandoned: a bad and complex omen.
(8) Nevertheless it proved Bonaparte a bona fide creative psychoanalyst and not a dilettante propped up by her friendship with Freud.
(9) "There's no need to be artsy-fartsy … only dilettantes prefer enigmatic works."
(10) Ronson admits it rankles when people assume he got his breaks because of his privileged background or that he is little more than a millionaire dilettante, playing with his electronic synths and Gucci-designed shoes whenever the fancy takes him.
(11) Bush isn’t succumbing to Sting-esque world music dilettantism, though, as the seemingly incongruous parts are all held together in service of her unique musical vision.
(12) The documentary explores the headlong rush of a brilliant schoolboy with illegible handwriting who enjoyed the dilettante life of Oxford University before illness sparked a lifelong frenzy of discovery about the origins of the universe, which began as a graduate at Cambridge University and has astounded the world.
(13) Russell Brand's call on the young not to vote was the pseudo-leftism of a dumb dilettante precisely because politicians can ignore the interests of the young when the young do not threaten them at the polling booths.
(14) "[Gandhi] came off as a practiced politician who knew how to get his message across, was precise and articulate and demonstrated a mastery that belied the image some have of [him] as a dilettante," the official said.
(15) Her Stakhanovite work rate as a writer and as a working peer made most of us feel like dilettantes.
(16) Along the way, there has been the worst kind of ministerial dilettantism and inconsistency.
(17) Unlike his TV persona as Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock , the self-described dilettante is an intelligent interviewer with a voice that mesmerises.
(18) It's hard to work out if Lebedev worries about whether people see him as a spoilt, rich dilettante.
(19) His appointment was not a success, not least with Castle, who regarded him as a dilettante, not really interested in pursuing his policies and proposed legislation.
(20) Unlike dilettante-esque me, most of the journalists out in Brazil will be there for the full five weeks.