Dictionary

humbuggery en · NOUN

Etymology

From humbug + -ery.

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) trickery; deception
   • Both see Leviathan more as a photograph than a metaphor — a reality veiled by rhetoric — and thereby claim a position of epistemic privilege, a Realpolitik, a discourse shorn of humbuggery and pretense. 1996, Charles Arthur Willard, Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy:
   • Peale, however, was never accused of humbuggery — not in his entertainments, not in his marketing strategies, and above all not in his public persona. 2001, James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum:

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