(n.) A trivial mechanism; a device; a toy; a pretty thing.
Example Sentences:
(1) Facebook Twitter Pinterest On our maritime borders, armed servicemen have repeatedly coerced refugees onto gimcrack lifeboats and pushed them out to sea.
(2) Fortunately, once the implications have sunk in, Emmott expects take-up for such a gimcrack scheme to be low among both employees and firms that take management seriously – a joke rather than a serious danger.
(3) Niko's real pathos derives not from the gimcrack story but how he looks and moves.
(4) More thoroughgoing restorers might despise the gimcrack painted floorboards in the long gallery (they can still be detected by the attentive eye today), but his creation in the Suffolk countryside was sensational in its day and was a forerunner of many such conversions.
(5) That gimcrack organisation's UN spokesman said that it wants to organise Gaddafi's trial, but it is plainly unable to secure an unbiased legal process when he does fall into its hands.
(6) I fear the user interfaces will be labyrinths of glistering advertising, festooned with social-media gimcracks, and that the focus of these corporations is dangerously diluted away from producing surprising, novel, fun games.
Meretricious
Definition:
(a.) Of or pertaining to prostitutes; having to do with harlots; lustful; as, meretricious traffic.
(a.) Resembling the arts of a harlot; alluring by false show; gaudily and deceitfully ornamental; tawdry; as, meretricious dress or ornaments.
Example Sentences:
(1) It was the hangover of a meretricious general election.
(2) Hugh Trevor-Roper denounced it as this "meretricious, misleading work".
(3) To pretend otherwise is self-indulgent and meretricious.
(4) The campaign against next week's election of police commissioners is meretricious.
(5) "There is now a disproportionate amount of meretricious material aimed at appealing to public prurience, most of which revolves around the philandering of celebrities," he argues.
(6) Of course, even thinking in these crude competitive "scoresheet" terms is a very un-Serious thing to be doing, and the admirers of 12 Years a Slave may have a sinking feeling that it will not be properly rewarded in the tinselly, meretricious, un-Serious Oscar world.
(7) There is now a disproportionate amount of meretricious material aimed at appealing to public prurience, most of which revolves around the philandering of celebrities.
(8) Almost like the protagonist of a Victorian novel, Sharif was overtaken by his own success, to the extent that in order to service the debts incurred by gambling and a playboy lifestyle, he was thrown back on accepting any work that came his way, and entered a downward spiral into trivial and meretricious movies.
(9) Churchill's grandson, the Conservative MP Winston Churchill , wrote to Armstong worried that "my grandfather's wartime diary appears to have fallen into the hands of this meretricious historian, David Irving."
(10) Novels that sparkled in the summer sun will seem flashy and meretricious in the sober light of autumn.