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trumpery

noun

No English definition recorded for this entry.

L329671 on Wikidata ↗

Wiktionary

Pronunciation: /ˈtɹʌmpəɹi/

adj

Etymology: From Middle English trompery, from Middle French tromperie (“deceit”).

  1. Gaudy but worthless.

    “He earnestly exhorted them all to be earnest in their studies, and to think nothing beneath them. Let them not pass over any cases as unimportant; for they must remember that some of the greatest principles of the law had been enunciated out of the most apparently trumpery cases that had come before the judges.”

    “I also remember the old Royal Mews that stood on the site of the present trumpery National Gallery, with its too suggestive pepper-boxes; […]”

noun

Etymology: From Middle English trompery, from Middle French tromperie (“deceit”).

  1. Worthless finery; bric-a-brac or junk.

    “I have ſold all my Tromperie: not a counterfeit Stone, not a Ribbon, Glaſſe, Pomander, Browch, Table-booke, Ballad, Knife, Tape, Gloue, Shooe-tye, Bracelet, Horne-Ring, to keepe my Pack from faſting: […]”

    “PROSPERO.^([To Ariel]) / This was well done, my bird. / Thy shape invisible retain thou still: / The trumpery in my house, go bring it hither / For stale to catch these thieves.”

  2. Nonsense.

    “Now upon the coming of Chriſt, very much, tho' not all, of this idolatrous Trumpery and Superſtition was driven out of the World: […]”

  3. Deceit; fraud.

    “1640, Richard Greenwey, The Annales of Cornelius Tacitus. The Description of Germanie, publ. by Richard Whitaker, 182. Agrippina after this, more mad and wilfull then ever, gave out threatning and thundring ſpeeches: yet not forbearing the Princes eares, but crying, that Britannicus was now growen to mans eſtate : a true and worthy plant to receive his fathers Empire, which a grafted ſon by adoption now poſſeſſed by the injury and trumpery of his mother.”

    “In that case there is no need for me to write about the trumpery scandal by which I was the sufferer—the innocent sufferer, I positively assert.”