humbuggery

plural humbuggeries

1. countableuncountabletrickery; deception

   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

   1 more example

   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