What's the difference between humbug and swindle?

Humbug


Definition:

  • (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.

Swindle


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To cheat defraud grossly, or with deliberate artifice; as, to swindle a man out of his property.
  • (n.) The act or process of swindling; a cheat.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The solar hypothesis was championed publicly in March by the controversial Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.
  • (2) One of my strongest memories of Malcolm is watching him reduce Richard Branson to tears by refusing to allow him to invest in my film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle .
  • (3) He sent me information about the film The Great Global Warming Swindle.
  • (4) But for Americans who are learning about the agreement, it is clear that the real "us against them" is not America against the more independent nations of the developing world, but TPP countries' citizens against a corporate swindle being negotiated behind their backs.
  • (5) As his 28-page petition seeking the Dallas injunction makes clear, even before the fevered allegations of "epic swindle" and conspiracies by the three directors and RBS, Hicks is obsessed with the $822m (£513m) valuation put on Liverpool by Forbes magazine and his belief that the club should fetch a fortune approaching that.
  • (6) They do the crossing of the Sahara desert, they are swindled, they are often being ransomed, it’s an incredibly violent trek to get to Libya and then cross into Europe.
  • (7) The court of grave crimes in Baku found leading Azeri activists, 59-year-old Leyla Yunus and her 60-year-old husband, Arif, guilty of swindling and tax evasion yesterday, and sentenced them to eight and seven-and-a-half years in prison respectively.
  • (8) Either a substitution without proxy or a swindle of one spouse by the other occurs in vital areas of their relation.
  • (9) Some environmentalists blame the public's doubts on last year's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and on recent books, including one by Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, that question the consensus on climate change.
  • (10) But those people would have no problem swearing an oath disingenuously, since they intended from the outset to swindle or bring down the institution anyway.
  • (11) The Texas District State Court petition accuses the chairman, Martin Broughton, appointed by the creditors Royal Bank of Scotland in April to oversee the sale of the club, and his fellow directors of acting as "pawns" of RBS to perpetrate an "epic swindle" in selling the club to NESV for less than half its supposed market value and ignoring several higher offers.
  • (12) They forever print tabloid tales of benefit cheats on the swindle, which is bad – I used to do it – but the reality that we lose £1bn a year on all benefit fraud combined, and £25bn on tax avoidance and evasion by big companies and the super rich is seldom reported.
  • (13) Cameron's role, in Putin's eyes, as modern-day useful idiot may be further enhanced by the former's cautiously oblique references to bilateral concerns including corruption, legal swindles encountered by British businesses and human rights issues.
  • (14) In other cases, the procedure may become a nightware coupled to a swindle, and even endanger the life of the hopeful mother-to-be.
  • (15) Magnitsky exposed the biggest tax swindle in Russian history, and was put to death by Russian officials for his pains.
  • (16) In other words, the emissions scandal is not confined to Volkswagen, to a single algorithm, or to the US: it looks, in all its clever variants, like a compound global swindle.
  • (17) Signatories included Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, editor of Energy and Environment, Jones's least favourite journal, and Martin Durkin, the British TV producer notorious for his programme The Great Global Warming Swindle.
  • (18) A spokesman for Guinness World Records told German paper Taz: "It seems that at the time Guinness was duped by this swindle just like the rest of the media."
  • (19) The Office for National Statistics report published yesterday on migration has provoked some predictable hysteria: the Sun’s headline is “Great Migrant Swindle”, while Allison Pearson in the Telegraph claims that “the gap between ONS migrant figures and the truth is as wide as the Grand Canyon”.
  • (20) For some reason, I can also vividly recall seeing an import single featuring Malcolm McLaren singing You Need Hands: presumably some lunatic at a continental record label had looked at the soundtrack of the Sex Pistols' film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and concluded that the track with most commercial potential was the one that featured their manager tunelessly bellowing his way through the old Max Bygraves number.