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spurious
in a sentence

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  • This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to...   (source)
    spurious = false; or not genuine -- often seeming plausible
  • Them and their floral trash, littering the precincts with the tokens of their spurious grief.†   (source)
  • One could not exactly call the contents of these files spurious or inaccurate.†   (source)
  • Nights, I spent reading Eugene Onegin or else poring over one of Welty's many furniture books (my favorite: an ancient two-volume work called Chippendale Furniture: Genuine and Spurious) or Janson's fat and satisfying History of Art.†   (source)
  • When Owen suggested that Deysel had been reduced to "serving as a token black woman to give the team a spurious South Africanism," Woodall threatened to kill both Owen and his wife.†   (source)
  • Her tone was spuriously jolly.†   (source)
  • "Re'lar Ambrose, in the future you will refrain from wasting our time with spurious charges."†   (source)
  • But already Johnnie knew that the spurious elegance of this young person's appearance was not what she wished to emulate.†   (source)
  • Milo nodded with spurious vim to indicate he still understood and then sat silent, ruminating gravely with troubled misgiving.†   (source)
  • He said it in a tone of spurious politeness intended to be recognized as spurious, the tone of tossing to a beggar the alms of face-saving.†   (source)
  • "If all goes well," the attorney Giuliani echoed, in the same voice that he would have used to draw attention to a spurious clause in a contract.†   (source)
  • If elections are held every year, there wouldn't be enough time to investigate spurious elections.†   (source)
  • She stood in the doorway, a few feet behind him, one hand on the doorknob—a portrait of spurious hesitancy about making another full entrance into the room.†   (source)
  • But the "Whitechapel" edition, besides being a fragment, abounds in such corrupt and probably spurious lines, as we have mentioned elsewhere, and is hardly to be trusted.†   (source)
  • For within these confessions it will be discovered that we really have no acquaintance with true evil; the evil portrayed in most novels and plays and movies is mediocre if not spurious, a shoddy concoction generally made up of violence, fantasy, neurotic terror and melodrama.†   (source)
  • The teaching he had offered, no matter how spuriously, had attracted this true believer, this one who had somehow achieved enlightenment, marked men's minds with his sainthood, and then gone willingly into the hands of Death himself.†   (source)
  • ...these all provided a spurious chain of evidence and Comrade Fiedler, on whose ambitions the British so accurately counted, accepted it;†   (source)
  • She liked the park because, however spuriously, it re-created something of the landscape she had known.†   (source)
  • The payment of our gov-ernment's debts—even to the "bloated bondholders" of Wall Street—in a debased, inflated currency, as the Bland Bill encouraged and the accompanying Matthews Resolution specifically provided, was an ethical wrong and a practical mistake, he felt, certain to embarrass our standing in the eyes of the world, and promoted not as a permanent financial program but as a spurious relief bill to alleviate the nation's economic distress.†   (source)
  • She's so charming, it's difficult to see past the spurious smile.
  • The cellar of the barn was spuriously cool, dank, smelling of cobwebs and earthwater.†   (source)
  • These men have committed no crimes and your client's documentation is spurious at best," Baldwin snapped back.†   (source)
  • It is not fortuitous therefore that the inflammatory promise she has been able to extend to me through that hyperactive organ of hers finds a correlation in the equally inflammatory but utterly spurious words she loves to speak.†   (source)
  • For the Princess: a little, very temporary, return to, recapture of, the spurious glory.†   (source)
  • Could a spurious countess have real furs?†   (source)
  • Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.†   (source)
  • Again Brown's voice came, high, full of alarm and spurious threat: "Don't you hit me!"†   (source)
  • And when they're used consciously, do they turn spurious?†   (source)
  • Brown held back, watching the deputy with his handsome, spuriously bold face.†   (source)
  • Shakespeare is treated as a dramatist, and in so far as his popularity is not spurious, it is held to be due to tricks of stagecraft which give good opportunities to clever actors.†   (source)
  • In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink.†   (source)
  • …Judith's bedroom or was sent from it, to sleep in the hall (where Clytie had likewise moved her pallet) though not on a pallet like her but on a cot, elevated still and perhaps not by Judith's decree either but by the negress' fierce inexorable spurious humility; and then in the attic, the cot moved there, the few garments (the rags of the silk and broadcloth in which he had arrived, the harsh jeans and homespun which the two women bought and made for him, he accepting them with no…†   (source)
  • He speaks now with a kind of spurious brusqueness which, flabbyjowled and darkcaverneyed, his face belies.†   (source)
  • …trundle bed beside Judith's, beside that of the woman who looked upon him and treated him with a cold unbending detached gentleness more discouraging than the fierce ruthless constant guardianship of the negress who, with a son of invincible spurious humility slept on a pallet on the floor, the child lying there between them unasleep in some hiatus of passive and hopeless despair aware of this, aware of the woman on the bed whose every look and action toward him, whose every touch of…†   (source)
  • …now not with the stubborn yet slowly tractable earth as it had done before, but now against the ponderable weight of the changed new time itself as though he were trying to dam a river with his bare hands and a shingle: and this for the same spurious delusion of reward which had failed (failed? betrayed. and would this time destroy) him once; I see the analogy myself now: the accelerating circle's fatal curving course of his ruthless pride, his lust for vain magnificence, though I did…†   (source)
  • It was fifteen years long: it ran between the savage and spurious board fronts of oil towns where, his inevitable serge clothing and light shoes black with bottomless mud, he ate crude food from tin dishes that cost him ten and fifteen dollars a meal and paid for them with a roll of banknotes the size of a bullfrog and stained too with the rich mud that seemed as bottomless as the gold which it excreted.†   (source)
  • …what was it you said? the magnolias in bloom and the mockingbirds, and in fifty years more, after they had gone and fought it and lost it and come back home, the Decoration Day and the veterans in the neat brushed hand-ironed gray and the spurious bronze medals that never meant anything to begin with, and the chosen young girls in white dresses bound at the waist with crimson sashes and the band would play Dixie and all the old doddering men would yell that you would not have thought…†   (source)
  • Yes, he had corrupted Ellen to more than renegadery, though, like her, unaware that his flowering was a forced blooming too and that while he was still playing the scene to the audience, behind him fate, destiny, retribution, irony—the stage manager, call him what you will—was already striking the set and dragging on the synthetic and spurious shadows and shapes of the next one.†   (source)
  • To wit, that a spurious Prince of Wales was being feasted by the city in his stead.†   (source)
  • The gale had ministered to a heroism as spurious as its own pretence of terror.†   (source)
  • With spurious enthusiasm he said, "Splendid!†   (source)
  • The resonant voice of the Hungarian was about to prevail in ridicule of the spurious lutes of the romantic painters when Segouin shepherded his party into politics.†   (source)
  • "I am afraid you cannot see her—she is an invalid," replied the present representative of the spurious house; for this was Mr Alec, the only son of the lately deceased gentleman.†   (source)
  • Her mother, with the idea of a career for Rosemary, would not tolerate any such spurious substitutes as the excitations available on all sides, and indeed Rosemary was already beyond that—she was In the movies but not at all At them.†   (source)
  • That institution is reserved for men like Kennicott who, after devoting fifty years to "putting aside a stake," incontinently invest the stake in spurious oil-stocks.†   (source)
  • It was a proximity based solely on illness; all the same, Joachim had a great deal of military integrity about him—though, granted, without his even being aware of it, that integrity was being increasingly satisfied by rest cures, to the point where they had become, as it were, a substitute for duties fulfilled in the flatlands, a kind of spurious occupation.†   (source)
  • The aristocracy he defended, in spite of the political marriages by which it tried to secure breeding for itself, had its mind undertrained by silly schoolmasters and governesses, its character corrupted by gratuitous luxury, its self-respect adulterated to complete spuriousness by flattery and flunkeyism.†   (source)
  • And the night that encircled them, absolute as it seemed, was itself only a spurious unity, being modified by the gleams of day that leaked up round the edges of the earth, and by the stars.†   (source)
  • This seems to be a new family which had taken the name; for the credit of the former knightly line I hope they are spurious, I'm sure.†   (source)
  • When all men flinched, then—he felt sure—he alone would know how to deal with the spurious menace of wind and seas.†   (source)
  • With spurious cheerfulness she announced everywhere, "I guess I'm a born spinster," and "No one will ever marry a plain schoolma'am like me," and "You men, great big noisy bothersome creatures, we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have to be petted and guided.†   (source)
  • Barren attribute as it was, disastrous as its discovery had been in many ways to her, perhaps Mr Clare, as a gentleman and a student of history, would respect her sufficiently to forget her childish conduct with the lords and ladies if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people in Kingsbere Church really represented her own lineal forefathers; that she was no spurious d'Urberville, compounded of money and ambition like those at Trantridge, but true d'Urberville to the bone.†   (source)
  • The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy.†   (source)
  • She also stumbled, with a large balance of success against her failures, through various philanthropic recommendations to Try our Mixture, Try our Family Black, Try our Orange-flavoured Pekoe, challenging competition at the head of Flowery Teas; and various cautions to the public against spurious establishments and adulterated articles.†   (source)
  • The fellow (gentleman, as he styled himself) can hardly have been other than a spurious interloper; for, instead of seeking office from the king or the royal governor, or urging his hereditary claim to Eastern lands, he bethought himself of no better avenue to wealth than by cutting a shop-door through the side of his ancestral residence.†   (source)
  • That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make as good money!†   (source)
  • Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction.†   (source)
  • In the absence of any true aristocracy, the public service creates a spurious one, which is as much an object of ambition as the distinctions of rank in aristocratic countries.†   (source)
  • If society chooses to provide for its Irises better than for its working women, it must not expect honest playwrights to manufacture spurious evidence to save its credit.†   (source)
  • The glow lent a spurious look of ruddy health to the white cheeks.†   (source)
  • Once the searing effect of swallowing the stuff had passed, it did induce a certain spurious calmness.†   (source)
  • Though a wellpreserved man of no little stamina, if a trifle prone to baldness, there was something spurious in the cut of his jib that suggested a jail delivery and it required no violent stretch of imagination to associate such a weirdlooking specimen with the oakum and treadmill fraternity.†   (source)
  • …preservatives in sealed envelopes tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock, billets doux in the form of cocked hats, readymade suits, porringers of toad in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days' indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes, season tickets available for all tramlines, coupons of the royal and privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the World's Twelve Worst Books: Froggy And Fritz…†   (source)
  • It is an inconvenience mingled with the advantages of our frequent elections even in single States, where they are large, and hold but one legislative session in a year, that spurious elections cannot be investigated and annulled in time for the decision to have its due effect.†   (source)
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