(v. t.) To deceive; to impose; to cajole; to hoax.
(n.) An imposition under fair pretenses; something contrived in order to deceive and mislead; a trick by cajolery; a hoax.
(n.) A spirit of deception; cajolery; trickishness.
(n.) One who deceives or misleads; a deceitful or trickish fellow; an impostor.
Example Sentences:
(1) Vice, folly and humbug – it is the point of satire really.
(2) What more timely image could there be for his departure than a Christmas costume and a prescience for all the humbug that will inevitably attend his death.
(3) Shortly after, they began to produce confectioneries such as chocolate limes, humbugs and caramels.
(4) Gary McNair: War on Christmas Anyone who has ever felt like saying “Bah, humbug!” to the John Lewis ad will find a kindred spirit in Gary McNair, playing a Santa working in a down-at-heel Christmas grotto who decides to investigate what Christmas means if you are poor.
(5) But, you may exclaim, what humbug for countries that invaded Iraq to excoriate others for violating sovereignty.
(6) Counties lose their names, trains lose their livery, ginger snaps lose their flavour and mint humbugs their sharp corners ... under my derationalisation programme, Yorkshire would get back its Ridings, the red telephone box would be a preserved species, there would be Pullman cars called Edna, a teashop in every high street and a proper card index in the public library."
(7) Accusing his opponents of "the most blatant hypocrisy in pretending they have changed to a modern, enlightened party", Lord Lester said: "What they have done is seek to destroy the central purpose of the bill under the guise of giving rights to others and it's complete humbug done for electoral purposes."
(8) It has not reached the pitch of disintegration at which humbug can be dropped."
(9) Lymphocystis disease is reported for the first time from the white-tailed damselfish, Dascyllus aruanus, and the black-tailed humbug, Dascyllus melanurus.
(10) I thought of the tourist scrums pushing each other off the pavements, jostling for souvenir humbugs and wind-up Beefeaters.
(11) Typical young man's title, you see, typical piece of that sort of humbugging, canting rhetoric, which young men - bless their hearts - specialise in.
(12) We probably all know a few pre-Games humbug-criers – shouting themselves hoarse in stadiums or rapt and sometimes in tears in front of the TV – who have looked like Scrooge on Christmas morning in the last few weeks.
(13) So the return of WTPS may serve to revive the genre, the old ghost donning its armour to do battle once more with humbug and pomposity.
(14) It was a strange experience to hear this paragon of logic, sceptical of all humbug trotting out stories that normally he would have scoffed at.
(15) It's enough to put you off shopping altogether, and has done for Nicole Slavin who is "bah humbug about Christmas , partly because of the commercialisation and the sheer social pressure to buy people things".
(16) For Labour, with the taste of Suez still in their mouths, Hugh Gaitskell described this as "the worst humbug and hypocrisy."
(17) Their latest, Humbug , recorded in the Californian desert with Josh Homme, reveals a more mature, assured band.
Jest
Definition:
(n.) A deed; an action; a gest.
(n.) A mask; a pageant; an interlude.
(n.) Something done or said in order to amuse; a joke; a witticism; a jocose or sportive remark or phrase. See Synonyms under Jest, v. i.
(v. i.) The object of laughter or sport; a laughingstock.
(v. i.) To take part in a merrymaking; -- especially, to act in a mask or interlude.
(v. i.) To make merriment by words or actions; to joke; to make light of anything.
Example Sentences:
(1) Dawn Powell: A Time to Be Born (1942) Joseph Heller: Catch-22 (1961) Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions (1973) David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (1996) The American comedy, generally speaking, is a scatological thing, or a repository of racial prejudice or gender stereotypes.
(2) Defining what constitutes merely a jest and what is of a "menacing character" has not been easy for the judges.
(3) In Hall’s farewell season of Shakespeare’s late romances in 1988, he led the company alongside Michael Bryant and Eileen Atkins , playing a clenched and possessed Leontes in The Winter’s Tale; an Italianate, jesting Iachimo in Cymbeline; and a gloriously drunken Trinculo in The Tempest (he played Prospero for Adrian Noble at the Theatre Royal, Bath, in 2012).
(4) The 2010 book was written by Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky, and is what it says on the tin: an account of a road trip with the author as he went across the US promoting his 1,100-page novel Infinite Jest, recalling the conversations the pair have and the fame that Foster Wallace is starting to experience.
(5) From Glasgow, Leeds , Bristol and Dublin , to New York , San Diego and Vancouver , to Perth , Melbourne and Sydney , groups of non-believers will be getting together to form their own monthly Sunday Assemblies, with the movement's founders – the standup comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans – visiting the fledgling congregations in what they are calling, only partly in jest, a "global missionary tour".
(6) I did not say so, thank God, even in jest, otherwise our encounter could have been even worse than it was.
(7) "That was totally in jest," he added, saying he would "tone down my sense of humour until I become president, because America needs to get a sense of humour".
(8) Green's husband Wallace, best known for the novel Infinite Jest, committed suicide at home in 2008 , and was found by Green.
(9) "F alsehood flies," wrote Jonathan Swift 300 years ago, "and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect."
(10) ‘What is truth?” said jesting Pilate – in Bacon’s famous phrase.
(11) It was a jibe made in jest by a man who had much fondness for him.
(12) In comments that a source said were largely made in jest, Johnson – who is also the Conservative candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip – attacked the former prime minister over his speech in support of Labour’s current leader Ed Miliband.
(13) Although this article is presented in jest, I am not above anything that works to get contributions for my newsletter.
(14) I saw Brand's Messiah Complex show in London the other week, in which he – in jest, of course – compares himself to Che Guevara, Gandhi, Malcolm X and Christ.
(15) He likes winding people up, being controversial for the sake of it and more often than not what he says is in jest.
(16) In jest or in earnest, there is a rank hypocrisy here that sits uncomfortably with me.
(17) It was planned as the much-anticipated follow-up to Infinite Jest , the teeming 1,000-page bleakly comic masterpiece that had established Wallace, at 34, as the man most likely to redefine the scope and voice of the American novel.
(18) One 18th-century classicist is even said to have planned to write a scholarly edition of the best-known joke book of that period, Joe Miller's Jests , in order to show that every single joke in it was descended from the ancient Laughter Lover .
(19) Eurozone unlocks €10.3bn bailout loan for Greece Read more I jest of course.
(20) A number of edits, apparently made in jest, have been picked up by the automatic twitter bot Congress Edits , which monitors Wikipedia for changes to the site made by accounts with IP addresses coming from inside the US legislature.