(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.
Nonsense
Definition:
(n.) That which is not sense, or has no sense; words, or language, which have no meaning, or which convey no intelligible ideas; absurdity.
(n.) Trifles; things of no importance.
Example Sentences:
(1) Virtually every developed country has some form of property tax, so the idea that valuing residential property is uniquely difficult, or that it would be widely evaded, is nonsense.
(2) To this end, a meiosis-defective mating-type mutation was used as a marker for the plus segment, by taking advantage of its suppressibility by a nonsense suppressor.
(3) Real ear CVRs, calculated from real ear recordings of nonsense syllables, were obtained from eight hearing-impaired listeners.
(4) The first paper of this series (Picheny, Durlach, & Braida, 1985) presented evidence that there are substantial intelligibility differences for hearing-impaired listeners between nonsense sentences spoken in a conversational manner and spoken with the effort to produce clear speech.
(5) These data suggest that yeast tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase interacts with positions 34 and 35 of the anticodon of tRNATyr and opens the possibility that nonsense suppressor efficiency may be mediated by the level of aminoacylation.
(6) But this no-nonsense venue, just 10km but a world away from parliament, is the latest stop in a national pro-renewables tour that is making the Abbott government decidedly uncomfortable.
(7) Free recall of nonsense syllables was significantly better when these were learned under active compound.
(8) "It is clear this is a government which is short of ideas, desperately trying to bring up nonsensical diversions to distract attention from the situation in the country.
(9) Four regA mutants (regA1, regA8, regA11, and regA15) failed to make a protein having a molecular weight of about 12,000, whereas mutant regA9 did make such a protein; regA15 produced a new, apparently smaller protein that was presumably a nonsense fragment, whereas regA11 produced a new, apparently larger protein.
(10) In the first, span and free-recall measures were obtained for 24 subjects, each tested with four types of spoken material (nonsense syllables, random words, fourth-order approximations to English, and normal prose).
(11) I’d have been a TV celeb type, done these albums that are nonsense – and yeah, with hindsight, that wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
(12) In addition, purified protein of 62,000 daltons, resulting from the suppression of the nonsense mutations tox-30 and tox-45, will react with antisera purified against the terminal 17,000 daltons of the toxin molecule and are immunologically identical to toxin by radial immunodiffusion.
(13) The other three carry nonsense mutations which inactivate both the excision repair and essential functions.
(14) La Manga in Spain is an example of human nonsense: 20km of city length, two kilometres wide, with huge buildings all along,” said Couet.
(15) In a sign of Labour's need to avoid tension with business, Darling was careful to stress he was not criticising the signatories but said: "I wonder if one of their finance directors came to them and said 'look, we have this wonderful idea, and we are going to pay with it by savings we have not yet identified and by calculations we cannot verify', they would say 'that is complete nonsense'."
(16) The mutation, which is not of the common CG-to-TG type, is at the same codon in which both nonsense and a different missense (Arg to Gln) have previously been observed.
(17) Introduction of an ochre nonsense codon into the reading frame of the leader peptide sequence leads to considerable reduction of the basal expression and loss of inducibility of the cat gene.
(18) On the Iraq war, he admitted he had voted in favour of military action in 2003 though he said he thought at the time that Blair's claims about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were "nonsense".
(19) Two nonsense mutations at codon positions 33 and 187 and an aberrant splice site were found in the human gene.
(20) The studies on the reverse mutation of osm3 indicated that this osmotic-sensitivity arises from a missense or nonsense mutation in OSM3 locus.