Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Pretentious, insincere, or empty language.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A contrivance for clapping in theaters.
- noun Figuratively, an artifice or device to elicit applause or gain popularity; deceptive show or pretense.
- Designing or designed merely to win approval or catch applause.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Contrived for the purpose of making a show, or gaining applause; deceptive; unreal.
- noun obsolete A contrivance for clapping in theaters.
- noun A trick or device to gain applause, especially pretentious but empty rhetoric; humbug.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun pompous or pretentious talk or writing
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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This claptrap is ideological, rigid and disconnected from reality:
Jonathan Lewis: Mosquitoes and Markets Don't mix Jonathan Lewis 2010
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This claptrap is ideological, rigid and disconnected from reality.
Jonathan Lewis: Mosquitoes and Markets Don't mix Jonathan Lewis 2010
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For those who believe this claptrap from the likes of Al Gore and his climate change scientific wizards, than go right now and junk your vehicles and walk, move out of your carbon polluting homes and live in a tent or find a cave.
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This claptrap is ideological, rigid and disconnected from reality:
Jonathan Lewis: Mosquitoes and Markets Don't mix Jonathan Lewis 2010
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Trying to shame me with religious claptrap is less useful than tits on a boar.
Think Progress » Democratic Offices Vandalized In Days Surrounding Health Care Vote 2010
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If I understand Dispensational theology (and that may not even be possible, given the inherent contradictions and outright nonsense with which such premillennial claptrap is imbued), the coming of the "anti-Christ" should be a good thing, since it presages The Rapture, wherein the Righteous are bodily ascended into heaven, leaving the rest of us heathens and unbelievers to live in peace, once and for all.
Discourse.net: New Low For McCain Campaign: Obama == The Anti-Christ 2008
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But how do we know that this tells us any more than that a large pile of illogical claptrap is related to a small pile of neurons?
Carry-Over Thread 2007
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Whoever writes this claptrap is truly stupid – and you are doubly stupid for reporting it.
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Why the need for this emotive claptrap, which is mostly not actually relevant to the comments here?
Buzz Aldrin Says We Can Get to Mars by 2019 | Universe Today 2010
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(This is the meaning of the word "claptrap" BTW; claptrap is a planted line you are forced to applaud for.)
arby commented on the word claptrap
also spelled clap-trap
February 15, 2007
missanthropist commented on the word claptrap
Nonsense, lies, exaggeration, bs 1950's slang.
July 16, 2008
yarb commented on the word claptrap
Citation on leucotomise.
September 28, 2008
whichbe commented on the word claptrap
It's a trap.
October 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word claptrap
As a publisher once told H. L. Mencken, “there are four kinds of books that never, under any circumstances, lose money in the United States—first, detective stories, secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly debauched by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism, and other claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.�?
—via 3 Quarks Daily
My god! The plot of my bestseller drops into my lap like a ripe plum. The ghost of Lincoln debauches Nancy Drew.
August 14, 2009