Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Sham   /ʃæm/   Listen
Sham

noun
1.
Something that is a counterfeit; not what it seems to be.  Synonyms: fake, postiche.
2.
A person who makes deceitful pretenses.  Synonyms: fake, faker, fraud, imposter, impostor, pretender, pseud, pseudo, role player, shammer.



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Sham" Quotes from Famous Books



... not have found the tiny thing there for weeks—as a matter of fact I did find it two days after Manderson was dead—but a police search would have found it in five minutes. And then I—I with the case and its contents in my pocket, my false name and my sham spectacles and the rest of it—I should have had no explanation to offer but the highly convincing one that I didn't ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley

... heaven would have opened to her— a little way at least—probably to close again for a time. Now she felt crushed. The idea of undertaking that for which she knew herself so ill fitted was not merely odious but frightful to her. She was ready enough to work, but it must be real, not sham work. She must see and consult Mary! This was quite another affair from Tom! She would take the first opportunity. In the mean time there was nothing to be done or said; and with a heavy heart she held her peace—only longed for her ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... made the rah-rah boys sore," went on the bell-boy. "I heard them talking about it before I left them. It seems, too, that the manager sent the head waiter to stop their nonsense in the dining room to-night. For some reason these sham college boys blame you fellows for that humiliation also. So they're chuckling over what they've done to your outfit to teach you to mind your own business, as they ...
— The High School Boys' Training Hike • H. Irving Hancock

... argument. May I bring you back for a moment to the argument? You were saying that these modern conjuring tricks are simply the old miracles when they have once been found out. But surely another view is possible. When we speak of things being sham, we generally mean that they are imitations of things that are genuine. Take that Reynolds over there of the Duke's great-grandfather. [Points to a picture on the wall.] If I were to say it ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton

... the witch, who refuses cup, steed, and girdle. Here our version makes such abrupt transitions, that it will be well to explain what takes place. The Belly Blind or Billie Blin (see Young Bekie, First Series, pp. 6, 7) advises Willie to make a sham baby of wax, and invite his witch-mother to the christening. Willie does so (in stanzas lost between our 33 and 34); the witch, believing the wax-baby to be flesh and blood, betrays all her craft by asking who has loosed the knots, ta'en out the kaims, ta'en down the ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick

... Byron's day, there were thousands to whom the world 'was a blank' at twenty or thereabouts, and of whose dark imaginings,' as Macaulay says, the waste was prodigious; so now there are hundreds of dilettanti pantheists', mystics and sceptics to whom everything is a 'sham,' an 'unreality'; Who tell us that the world stands in need of a great 'prophet,' a seer,' a 'true prophet', a large soul,' a god-like soul,'*—who shall dive into 'the depths of the human consciousness,' and whose 'utterances' shall rouse the human mind ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... peculiar tongue, the product of sham education and a mock refinement grafted upon a stock of robust vulgarity. One and all would have been moved to indignant surprise if accused of ignorance or defective breeding. Ada had frequented an "establishment for young ladies" up to the close of her seventeenth year: the other two had pursued ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... Baal Shem's daughter—a beautiful black-eyed girl—danced with such fire and fervor that her crimson head-cloth nearly dropped off, and I, being now in a cheerful mood, fell to envying her husband, who for his part conversed blithely with the rescued woman. In the middle of the gaiety the Baal Sham retired to a corner, observing he wished to say his Mincha prayer, and bidding us continue our merriment ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... lanes with some one resembling me in figure. Heriot took the miller's view, counting the loss of one stout young Englishman to his country of far greater importance than the escapades of dozens of girls, for which simple creatures he had no compassion: he held the expression of it a sham. He had grown coxcombical. Without talking of his conquests, he talked largely of the ladies who were possibly in the situation of victims to his grace of person, though he did not do so with any unctuous boasting. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... being one of the few things that he could not do, he was obliged to let the boy go while he watched Maroney. The affair seemed to have come to the sticking point. Maroney's face showed deep anxiety, and his limping was all a sham. The boy had taken a note to some place, but where, ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton

... and Mr. Holway and everything else—the whole of it. Haven't you guessed it yet? It was all a sham; don't you see? When I came back from college and found out exactly how things were going, I realized at once that something must be done. You were miserable and neglected, and Mother was under the influence ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln

... yourselves, she 's the only one left to love me,' said Hollyhock. 'Oh, for goodness' sake, don't rush at me with your sham kisses! I can't abide them, or you. Get away, will you, and leave me in peace!—Jean, poor beastie! And do you love your little mistress? You are the only one I have got, Jean, my bonnie pussie; the only one who, like ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade

... is reported that a sham railroad station has been built outside of Cologne to deceive French aviators; the Second Secretary of the British Legation ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... have ever known what they wanted, it is no longer possible for them to speak above their breath. Obey. Perinde ac cadaver.... Ten millions of corpses.... The living are hardly better off, depressed as they are by four years of sham patriotism, circus-parades, tom-toms, threats, braggings, hatreds, informers, trials for treason, and summary executions. The demagogues have called in all the reserves of obscurantism to extinguish the last gleams of good sense that lingered ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... of change, far off as it had once seemed, came within "measurable distance"? The generation to which they belonged had been brought up with strong exhortations to be real, and to hate shams; and now the question was forced on them whether it was not a sham for the English Church to call itself Catholic; whether a body of teaching which was denounced by its authorities, however it might look on paper and be defended by learning, could be more than a plausible literary hypothesis in contrast to the great working system of which the head ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... betrayed into the contrary; but they were by this time in the High Street, bowing to others of the committee on their way to the town-hall, a structure of parti-coloured brick in harlequin patterns, with a peaked roof, all over little sham domes, which went far to justify its title of the Rat-house, since nothing larger could well use them. The facade was thus somewhat imposing; of the rear the less said the better; and as to the interior, it was at present one ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... possibly, the ideals are very low; but more than I can hope to find elsewhere. Even now I am certainly happier in the work than I have been for years." She looked up at him quickly, her eyes pleading. "It is not the glitter, the sham, the applause," she hastened to explain, "but the real work itself, that attracts and rewards me—the hidden labor of fitly interpreting character—the hard, secret study after details. This has become a positive passion, an inspiration. I may never become the perfected ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish

... take Gordon long to find out that the khedive's newly discovered zeal in putting down the slave-trade was 'a sham to catch the attention of the English people,' but the weapon had been thrust into his hands, and he meant to use it for the help of the oppressed tribes. Difficulties he knew there would be, and he was ready to fight ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang

... French from this continent. The Secretary of State, Seward, counseled negotiation first, and, applying the Monroe Doctrine, was able to prevail upon Napoleon III to withdraw his troops. Without the support of French arms, the sham empire in Mexico collapsed like a house of cards and the unhappy Maximilian, the victim of French ambition and intrigue, met his death at the hands of a ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... to his being dismissed from that College. He had also become acquainted with Francis Dashwood, the notorious Lord le Despencer, and many a winter's night saw him riding through the misty Thames meadows to the door of the sham Franciscan abbey. In his diaries were more notices than one of the "Franciscans" and ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner

... not on the steps of the old castle of which Prince LLEWELLYN was once lord that you are thus received. By the side of the old ruin has grown up another Hawarden Castle, a roomy mansion, statelily stuccoed, with sham turrets run up, buttresses, embrasures, portholes, and portcullises, putting to shame the rugged, looped and windowless ruin that still stands on the projecting ridge. This dates only from the beginning of the century, and, looking upon it, your face glows with honest pride, as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various

... which is half an hour from the Khan on our right, and at the end of six hours reached a high uneven plain, situated between the Anti Libanus and the chain of hills which commence near Katana; the plain is called Szakhret el Sham [Arabic]. Seven hours and a half, the ruined Khan Meylesoun [Arabic]. Eight hours and a half brought us to the termination of the Szakhret, from which we descended into the Ghouta, or plain of Damascus. At nine hours, the village Mezze [Arabic], ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... laughed much at the recollection of this, poor Johanna Elizabetha's solitary witticism. The Sittmann was Dame du Palais, her stepsons were Kammerjunker (equerries) to the Duke. Pages were chosen from among the younger Tuebingen students, and any chance visitor was given a high-sounding title and a sham office. The only work of the whole heterogeneous collection was to be gorgeously attired; but this was easy, as the Duke paid all expenses; to be young and gay, or you were even permitted to be old, could you be witty; and before every other duty came the obligation of treating the Countess ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... (lit. the Pleiades) and "Sham'adin" a would-be Arabic plur. of the Persian "Sham'adan"candlestick, chandelier, for which ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... thought. "She is herself a 'good sort.' I suppose she excuses the sham of her profession on the ground that it deceives ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin

... twelve month," said Rob-in, "Under this green wood tree. It were great sham-e," said Rob-in, "A knight alone to ride, Without squy-er, yeoman or page, To walk-e by his side. I shall thee lend Little Johan my man, For he shall be thy knave; In a yeoman's stead he may thee stand If thou great ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various

... organizing a contingent of foreign-drilled troops, under the guidance and leadership of two qualified foreign instructors. After some time had elapsed, and it was thought that the troops were sufficiently trained to make a good show, it was arranged that a sham fight should be held in the presence of the viceroy himself. The men were divided into two bodies under the two foreign commanders, and in the course of operations one body had to defend a village, while the other had to attack it. When the time came ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles

... no sham, requires no physical postures. It has to deal with the inner man whose sphere lies in the world of thought. To have the highest ideal placed before oneself and strive incessantly to rise up to it, is the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... in strategy, had devised a plan by which he hoped to lure the garrison from the fort. His scouts had apprised him that Harrison with a large force was at Sandusky, about sixty miles distant. The chief proposed that the Indians should gain the road which led from Sandusky to Fort Meigs and that a sham battle should be enacted there to deceive the garrison, who would naturally suppose that some of Harrison's force, coming to the fort, were being attacked. They would hasten to the assistance of their comrades, and the British would fall upon them in the rear, while a ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond

... covered it with animals, and filled it with productions beneficial to mankind. He then formed man and woman, put life into them, and called them Ong-we Hon-we a real people. [Footnote: This term is significant of true manhood. It implies that there was nothing of sham in their ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard

... dressing-table, and amongst the glitter of silver-mounted objects on it, the square white patch of an envelope. It was such an unusual thing to be seen there that he spun round almost before he realized his surprise; and all the sham men about him pivoted on their heels; all appeared surprised; and all moved rapidly ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad

... you—" he began; but Doctor Brown plucked himself free with startling promptitude, took a flying leap at the other, tore off his sham beard, tossing it into the air like one of the wild wisps of the cloud; then, with one wild kick, sent the easel flying topsy-turvy, and fled like a hare for the shore. Even at that dazzling instant Paynter felt ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton

... voice lifted itself belligerently. "What do you think she is? Imitation? Why, she's the one REAL thing in this whole sham world! I guess you've never met anybody who knew her or you wouldn't keep gulping out idiotic things like that! I guess if you ever talked with her even a minute you'd understand how real she is. She has the crispest—the sincerest way of speaking. Though of course it's not a bit ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... my duty to let you know, cousin Deborah, that this here chap's an impostor—a sham—and that you are a fool," was his conciliatory opening. "Search the register. The Thornlys have been yeomen of this parish ever since the time of Elizabeth—more shame to you for forcing the last of the race to seek his bread elsewhere; ...
— Aunt Deborah • Mary Russell Mitford

... as if the fire of hate tortured him, and striding about the room. "To fight every minute against this monster, to fight in every fashion, to irritate her, to destroy a grain of her influence, in a single mind, in a little community, to expose her pretense, her sham virtues, her splendid hypocrisy, these are the breath of my life. That hate will ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... has passed for realism on our American stage, has done its deadly work. It has killed romance. That is not at all what realism was intended to do. Indeed, to the larger view, romance is a part of the reality of life. Realism was a reaction against sham and falsity and sentimentalism, and, above all, perhaps, triviality of theme. But the net result, so far as the American drama is concerned, seems to have been the substitution of a realistic setting and dialogue for a false one, and then a continuance of the ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton

... all in silence heard, Sham'd to refuse, but fearful to accept. At length in anger Menelaus rose, Groaning in spirit, and with bitter words Reproach'd them: "Shame, ye braggart cowards, shame! Women of Greece! I cannot call you men! ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... Court conceded that "a system of exclusions could be so manipulated as to call a jury before which defendants would have so little chance of a decision on the evidence that it would constitute a denial of due process" and would result in a trial which was a "sham or pretense." A defendant is deemed entitled, however, to no more than "a neutral jury" and "has no constitutional right to friends on the jury."[874] In fact, the due process clause does not prohibit a State from excluding ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... one hundred thousand spectators. In the centre Caesar erected an obelisk one hundred and thirty-two feet high, brought from Egypt. The seats were arranged as in the theatre. Six kinds of games were celebrated: 1st, chariot racing; 2d, a sham-fight between young men on horseback; 3d, a sham-fight between infantry and cavalry; 4th, athletic sports of all kinds; 5th, fights with wild beasts, such as lions, boars, etc.; 6th, sea fights. Water was let into the canal to float ships. The combatants were captives, ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell

... Hera). Here the patient is expected to sleep over night in the temple, and the god visits him in a dream, and reveals a course of treatment which will lead to recovery. Probably there is a good deal of sham and imposture about the process. The canny priests know more than they care to tell about how the patient is worked into an excitable, imaginative state; and of the very human means employed to produce a satisfactory and informing dream.[] Nevertheless it is a great deal to convince the patient ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... left alone. He had no faith in Dr. Sampson's sympathy. The doctor had the reputation of being worth from thirty to forty thousand dollars, and his assumption of being a poor man Rodney knew to be a sham. ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger

... the attendant, "the captain don't; but this chap does. I haven't seen what I have amongst the sick and wounded without picking up a little, and I say Master Corporal here's doing a bit o' sham ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn

... of his own experience. It is a tribute to his clean traditions and sturdy self-reliance that he sat unabashed, pleased with the color, the gayety, the richness, but able still to distinguish the fine things from the sham, the honest things from those which only appeared honest—to feel a thrill of pride in his father's hard, rough-hewn ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader

... and enterprise,' he says with just prescience, 'will want other rewards than the mere accumulation of wealth,' and other rewards, may we add, than knighthoods and sham peerages. 'The awakening ambitions of the gifted and heroic will need fitting spheres for their honourable gratification,' and such spheres, we may be very sure, will not be found in a third-rate little consultative council, planted in a back-room in Westminster, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley

... not much of it, but what there is is pucka! There's nothing the matter with this representative of the people in the question of taste. Four Aubusson chairs... A bureau signed 'Percier-Fontaine,' for a wager... Two inlays by Gouttieres... A genuine Fragonard and a sham Nattier which any American millionaire will swallow for the asking: in short, a fortune... And there are curmudgeons who pretend that there's nothing but faked stuff left. Dash it all, why don't they do as I do? They should ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc

... sham world she and Nick had lived in during their few months together! What right had either of them to those exquisite settings of the life of leisure: the long white house hidden in camellias and cypresses above the lake, or the great rooms on the Giudecca with the shimmer of the canal always playing ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... all, thou must ride home from the Thing, and by that time thy husband will have come back, and will be glad to see thee; thou must he blithe and buxom to him, and he will think a good change has come over thee, and thou must show no signs of coldness or ill-temper, but when spring comes thou must sham sickness, and take to thy bed. Hrut will not lose time in guessing what thy sickness can be, nor will he scold thee at all, but he will rather beg every one to take all the care they can of thee. After that he will set off west to the Firths, and Sigmund with ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous

... terror to the candidates. Clad in cap and gown, he would reject his own son. Nothing will serve. Recommendations defeat their object. An unquestioned Roumanian ancestry, an extraction indisputably Japanese, find no more favor in his eyes than an assumed stammer, a sham deafness, or a convalescent pallor put on for the occasion. East and west are alike in his sight. The retired registrar, the pensioned usher aspiring late in life to some petty magistrature, are powerless to touch his heart. For ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... the universal solvent, the festive board was assigned the position nearest the building, a continuous shed protecting the restaurants of all nations, each with its proper specialty in the way of viands and service. Necessarily, there was in the carrying out of the latter idea a good deal of the sham and theatrical. But that gave the thing more zest, and the saloons were by no means the least effective feature of the appliances for introducing the races to each other. Tired of the tender intercourse of chopsticks, forks and fingers, they could exchange visits in their drawing-rooms; most of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various

... varieties of furniture should constitute the furnishings of a house, or to illustrate its style or fashion by drawings, and content ourself with the single remark, that it should, in all cases, be strong, plain, and durable—no sham, nor ostentation about it—and such as is made for use: mere trinkets stuck about the room, on center tables, in corners, or on the mantel-piece, are the foolishest things imaginable. They are costly; they require ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen

... arises from the hollowness of the outward forms which pass current in society and at home for vital Christianity. These spurious forms, fortunately or unfortunately, soon betray themselves. How little there is in them becomes gradually apparent. And rather than indulge in a sham the budding sceptic, as the first step, parts with the form and in nine cases out of ten concerns himself no further to find a substitute. Quite deliberately, quite honestly, sometimes with real regret and even at personal sacrifice he takes up his position, and to his parent's sorrow and his church's ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... every child in the union knows that the most famous products of Connecticut are Yankee notions, nutmegs made of wood and clocks that won't go. Now, your Civil Service Reform is just such another Yankee notion; it's a wooden nutmeg; it's a clock with a show case and sham works. And you know it! You are precisely the old-school Connecticut peddler. You have gone about peddling your wooden nutmegs until you have got yourself into Congress, and now you pull them out ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams

... realities of life for mere momentary plausibilities. Probably, also, there is no artist in French prose more seductive in his eloquence than Rene de Chateaubriand; but his fiction is no longer read, because the world has found that his sentimentalism was to this extent a sham—it was false to the nature of normal human beings. "Alice in Wonderland" will survive the works of both these able authors, because of the many and momentous human truths that look upon us through its ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... old church in a large town ten miles from here to-day with Sergeant Hodge. There were the usual tinsel things and red baize and sham flowers. Sergeant Hodge much impressed. He said after we emerged: "You know, sir, it's very fine indeed. It puts me in mind of a bazaar." This was in all good faith, and was intended as a great compliment to the church! We are having lots ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson

... happened, on the contrary, that I had a perfect craze for being despised. I doated on being despised; and considered contempt the sincerest a sort of luxury, that I was in continual fear of losing. I lived in a panic, lest I should be suspected of shamming contemptibility. But I did not sham it. I trusted that I was really entitled to contempt; and, for this, I had some metaphysical-looking reasons, which there may be occasion to explain further on. At present, it is sufficient to give a colorable rationality to my craze, if I say, that the slightest ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... opened up to him, beneath all its sham mysticism, its intolerable affectations, its grotesque parody of spirituality—of all of which he was largely aware—a glimmering avenue of a faintly possible hope of which he had never dreamed—a hope, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson

... me the name of his own father! a precious fellow! Didn't I tell you 'twas a sham father? So now for the roasting I owe you, Mr. Jew." There was a large fire in the school-room; Mowbray, by a concerted movement between him and his friends, shoved the Jew close to the fire, and barricadoed him up, so that he could not escape, bidding him ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... peculiarity of hysterical women is the irresistible tendency to lie, which leads them to utter senseless falsehoods just for the pleasure of deceiving and making believe. They sham suicide and sickness or write anonymous letters full of inventions. Many, from motives of spite or vanity, accuse servants of dishonesty, in order to revel in their disgrace and imprisonment. The favourite calumny, however, is always an accusation of indecent behaviour, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... has never written to me," she said chokingly. "I've never had a letter from him since he went away, and that was on New Year's Eve. It's all been a mistake—a sham ... he never cared for me—he never really ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres

... of the Louvre, and in a way by the Portrait of a Slav Prince at the Hermitage, where a man in the alembic of Rembrandt's imagination has become a type. Also in The Reconciliation of David and Absalom at the Hermitage, where behind the sham trappings of the figures shine the eternal ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes

... days and months and years have been passed in these proceedings, and the parties to the suit are exhausted, and the whole matter in dispute is worn out with age, then these men, as if they were the very heads of their profession, often introduce sham advocates along with themselves. And when they have arrived within the bar, and the fortune or safety of some one is at stake, and they ought to labour to ward off the sword of the executioner from some innocent man, or calamity and ruin, then, with wrinkled brows, and arms thrown about ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... she said quickly, as he started, "not a sham name like yours, but really and truly SMITH—that was her husband's name! I'm not lying, Jim," she went on, evidently mistaking the cause of the sudden contraction of the man's face. "I didn't invent her nor her name; there IS such a woman, and ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte

... his client, in this desperate strait maintained that there might exist several copies of the books found in his possession, and that it was out of the question to condemn, on his own sham avowal, a man who appeared to be half cracked. The counsel for the prosecution said that that plea could not be urged in the case of the book printed by Lambert Palmart, as but one copy of that was in existence. But the prisoner's counsel retorted by putting in evidence attested ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts

... before her the next day in the hotel parlor, she reminded him in her exquisite beauty of a play seen from the back of the stage; the illusion so successful with the audience is there an exposed sham, without coherence, and without beauty. Her eyes had a scared look. She had to say to herself, if this is Horace then my time has come, if it is Arthur Dillon I have nothing to worry about, before her hate came to her aid and gave her courage. She murmured the usual formula of unexpected ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... to the adventure, was caught by the redness and whiteness, the brandnewness and compactness of the little houses; she was seduced beyond prudence by the sham ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... could I do? It seemed a crime to give, and a crime not to give. He cried like a child; said it was all a sham about his dinner and his robe de chambre. An aunt, two little cousins, an aged uncle at home—and not a cent in the house! What could I do? He says he'll return it ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... afraid to open my eyes, or even to breathe; and I thought that, if I could sham being dead, they would carry me on deck, and I would then soon show them the contrary. I guessed that I must have rolled over with my face away from the door, so that they couldn't see it. Presently I felt a hand placed on my shoulder to draw me round. I let them move ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston

... of danger, he had been somewhat impressed by the fierce aspect of the man from Pike County, and really looked upon him as a reckless daredevil who was afraid of nothing. Joe judged him more truly. He decided that a man who boasted so loudly was a sham. If he had talked less, he would have feared ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... Truth that will free you; and as long as you cling to false ideals and sham systems you must ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... perhaps—disgraced," Durrance repeated. "Well, the shock of the disgrace is, after all, his opportunity. Don't you see that? It's his opportunity to know himself at last. Up to the moment of disgrace his life has all been sham and illusion; the man he believed himself to be, he never was, and now at the last he knows it. Once he knows it, he can set about to retrieve his disgrace. Oh, there are compensations for such a man. You and I know a ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason

... from the overstrained politeness with which they had been received, were now attempting a transformation of their usual loundering gait into a martial stride, with the result of a foolish strut, very unlike the dignified progress of the sham earl, whose weak back roused in them no suspicion, and who had taken care they should not see his face. Across the paved court, and through the hall to the inner court, Tom led them, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... before we left for this big push we had a most interesting fight between a fleet of German planes and a French observation balloon, right over our heads. We saw five planes circle over our town, then put on, what we thought afterwards, a sham fight. One of them, after many fancy stunts, headed right for the balloon. They were all painted with our colors except one. This one went near the balloon. One kept right on. The other four shot the balloon up with incendiary bullets. The observers jumped into ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... is never here. Berlin, in the wanderlust of its darkened heavens, is not the ample-bosomed, begarneted, crimson-lipped Minna angling in its gaudy dance decoy in the Behrenstrasse; nor the satin-clad, pencilled-eyed Amelie ogling from her "reserved" table in the silly sham called Moulin Rouge; nor yet the more baby-glanced, shirtwaisted Ertrude laughing in the duntoned Cafe Lang. Berlin is not she who beckons by night in the Friedrichstrasse; nor the frowsy she who sings in the bier-cabarets that hover about the Lichtprunksaal. ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright

... celebrate a year of tournaments, but at the suggestion of the Treasurer of Portugal, John Affonso de Alemquer, he decided on this African crusade instead. For the same strength and money might as well be spent in conquests from the Moslem as in sham-fights between Christians. So after reconnoitring the place, and lulling the suspicions of Aragon and Granada by a pretence of declaring war against the Count of Holland, King John gained the formal consent of ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... So Sham o' Blue Bills, wi' thi pints and thi gills, It's baan to be better for thee, To Keighla an' back tha ma go in a crack, Wen tha's baan on a bit ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End

... plantations of rare specimens of the coniferous tribe had arisen at every available point of the landscape, wherever there had been barrenness before. Here and there the old timber had been thinned a little, always judiciously. No cockney freaks of fancy disfigured the scene. There were no sham ruins, no artificial waterfalls poorly supplied with water, no Chinese pagodas, or Swiss cottages, or gothic hermitages. At one point of the shrubbery where the gloom of cypress and fir was deepest, they came ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... Lutheran minister at Ebersdorf, had been promptly excluded from the Holy Communion, and now came whimpering to Herrnhut, and lifted up his voice against the Lutheran Church. he did not possess the garment of righteousness, he decked himself out with sham excitement and rhetoric; and, as these are cheap ribbons and make a fine show, he soon gained a reputation as a saint. He announced that he had been commissioned by God with the special task of reforming Count Zinzendorf; described Rothe as the "False Prophet" ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... Rebels retired to Fort Anderson, and offered a desperate resistance to our army and fleet. Owing to the shallowness of the water the latter could not come into close enough range to do effective work. Then the happy idea of this sham monitor suggested itself to some one. It was prepared, and one morning before daybreak it was sent floating in on the tide. The other monitors opened up a heavy fire from their position. The Rebels manned their guns and replied vigorously, ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... now had been pleasantly and superficially stirred, suddenly saw the play from a new angle. With quick imagination she visualized the great reality of which all this was but a clever sham. She saw Quin passing through it all, not to the thunder of stage shrapnel and the glare of a red spot-light, but in the life-and-death struggle of those eighteen months in the trenches. Before she knew it, she too was gazing absently into space, shaken with the profound ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... saw His own reflection and recoiled in awe; Saw himself there, a bright light shining through him, Not as he thought himself, but as men knew him. Before this sudden and revealing sense Each rag of sham, each tatter of pretence Withered and vanished, as dissolved in air, And left the shuddering human creature bare. But when they turned and looked upon a friend They saw a sight that all but made amend: For they beheld him as a radiant spirit Indued ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann

... English laws, and that it was indeed one consequence of all punishment. "Dat be ver strange," said the king; "for me know and hears good deal of your people, dough me no live among dem; and me have often hear dat sham is de consequence and de cause too of many of your rewards. Are your rewards and ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... I had a glimpse of the real Brierly a few days before he committed his reality and his sham together to the keeping of the sea. Of course I declined to meddle. The tone of this last "but you" (poor Brierly couldn't help it), that seemed to imply I was no more noticeable than an insect, caused me to look ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... body and mind, a diseased fondness for girls, deceitfulness. Of these results, the loss of will-power leaves the boy a prey not only to the temptations of impurity, but to every other form of temptation: the deceitfulness destroys his self-respect and turns his life into a sham." ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly

... satire that Mr. Robinson employs in his "Patriots" (1912), a satire that cuts into the sham agitation of some political leagues, an agitation that is talk only, and at the same time cuts with almost equal sharpness into the physical force party. It is true that it is not the motives but the wisdom of these ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... might well wish to drop out as they have done. Who blames them, too, if they slink off, hiding behind any cover that will conceal their trembling bodies until the whole army has gone by?—who blames them if they sham illness, lameness, anything that may be put forward as an excuse to set them free?—who blames them if a wayside cottage offers them shelter and, taking it, they leave the other poor wretches to go on? Who blames them then? No one—no one with a heart ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... be happy unless it's always building? That's why some people say it hasn't any intelligence at all. They won't even allow that it can build. They think its architectural talent is all a delusion and a sham; because it builds in season and out of season. Keep it in your study, and it will make a moat round the hearthrug with tobacco pouches and manuscripts and boots—whatever it can lay its hands on. It will ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery of Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-coast. To have once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist. O memorable little picture! The sun was gaining colour ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell

... redemptive religion is that of Buddhism. Buddhism teaches us that the world is a sham and an evil; and the duty of man is to appreciate this fact, and to deny the world, but here the matter ends—it ends with world-renunciation and self-renunciation. There is only a negative element in such a religion, no inspiration to live ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones

... an intuition rather than a certainty, but strong enough to induce him to alter his tactics. Leaving the girl, he set off on the track of the sham beggar. ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc

... tears and laughter, and the resourceful Aristide—has it lost its particular cunning that he should begin his romance of The Fortunate Youth (LANE) in a mood of heavy and misplaced facetiousness, and drift by way of Family Heraldry into an atmosphere of sham politics and a bright general glow of ineffectual snobbery? Paul Savelli, the fortunate youth, with his incredible beauty, his dreams, his accomplishments beyond all discernible cause, his faintly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various

... quality was sincerity. Priest and public man as he was, there was not a line of hypocrisy or cant in his whole being. A sham was to him intolerable, the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not. Reckless of consequences, of danger, of his popularity, and of his life, he blurted out the whole truth, as he saw it, "despite all cardinals, popes, kings and emperors, together with all ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... fought in defense of their own right to social veracity and sincerity in their thee-ing and thou-ing, in not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It was laid on George Fox that these conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body of his followers thereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice to truth, and so that their acts and the spirit they professed might ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... years men with our blood and our names have stood on this hill to hear the voice of the people, and to do justice between man and man. That's what the place was meant for. If it has lost that meaning, root it up—it is a show and a sham." ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... keeping up a sham pursuit of the soldiers, so as to send them well on their way. I told them not to overtake them, as there was no occasion for any further bloodshed, when you were once out of their hands. By tomorrow morning they will all ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty

... make myriads of useful and artful articles from rough metal, are fingers which this age alone has evolved. The craft which makes useful things cheap can make cheap things beautiful. The Japanese will teach us how to form and finish, if we do not first teach them how to slight and sham. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various

... all alike. A tear rose to her eye. She bravely dried it with a finger of a white cotton glove, and produced her purse, an imitation crocodile-leather and sham-silver affair, bought in Kentish Town, where you may walk through odorous groves of dried haddocks that are really whiting, and Yarmouth bloaters that never were at Yarmouth, and purchase whole Rambler roses, the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... me entreat you to remember my last words. Addressing myself to you, as teachers, I would say, mere book learning in physical science is a sham and a delusion—what you teach, unless you wish to be impostors, that you must first know; and real knowledge in science means personal acquaintance with the facts, be ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... their backs than the scanty and useless coatee; in this they parade, and in this they are supposed to fight. Behind, two little timid-looking skirts descend any thing but gracefully; they are too small to have any grace in them; and a pair of sham cotton epaulettes, or large unmeaning wings, are supposed, by a pleasing fiction of the military tailors, to adorn their shoulders. Now, this garment, we contend, is neither ornamental nor graceful: were it cut down into the common ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... profiting by the directions they offer." She would have us know also that "it is not the people who make small technical mistakes or even blunders, who are barred from the paths of good society, but those of sham and pretense whose veneered vulgarity at every step tramples the flowers in the gardens of cultivation." To her mind the structure of etiquette is comparable to that of a house, of which the foundation is ethics and the rest good taste, correct speech, quiet, unassuming behavior, ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter of detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... a courier to announce the neighborhood of a hostile tribe. Instantly there was a wild scramble for mounts and weapons. The enemy rushed in, and for ten minutes there was a sham battle which filled the place with noise and confusion. This battle was copied as exactly as it could be copied from one of the scrimmages in which I had taken part in my first days as a scout. Then ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)

... O, Conspiracy! Sham'st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night, When evils are most free? O, then, by day, Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, Conspiracy; Hide it in smiles and affability; For if thou path thy native semblance on, Not Erebus itself ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... gainers by the events of the momentous year were the representatives of the centralizing principle. But the effective centralizing principle was not represented by the Emperor, for he stood for what was after all largely a sham centralism, because it was a centralism on a scale for which the Germanic world was not ripe. Princes and margraves were destined to be bearers of the territorial centralization, the only real one to which the German peoples were to attain for a long time ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... girl had herself suffered far too much during their flight from the Apaches for the pursuit to have been a sham. But she may very well have had an arrangement with the renegades to lure a victim into the Basin; and then, untrustful of their bloodthirsty instincts, had fled with her prize to the Hole, so that he ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet

... invaders of his rights withstood," was surprised in his own house by major Weymies, who tore him away from his shrieking wife and children, marched him up to Cheraw court-house, and after exposing him to the insults of a sham trial, had him condemned and hung! The only charge ever exhibited against him was, that he had shot across Black river at ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... strictly forbidden to visit Manila; but as that city did not want to do without Indian merchandise, and could not import it in its own ships, it was brought there in English and French bottoms, which assumed a Turkish name, and were provided with an Indian sham-captain. ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.



Words linked to "Sham" :   Potemkin village, bullshit, fraud, ringer, trickster, play, counterfeit, pseudo, slicker, act, cheat, imitation, fake book, belie, false, imitative, mouth, take a dive, dissemble, name dropper, beguiler, talk through one's hat, make, role player, misrepresent, make believe, cheater, bull, play possum, Tarabulus Ash-Sham, feint, deceiver



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com