faux

He flings his lunch against the wall, shattering a piece of Nancy Reagan’s china and leaving a trail of ketchup and hamburger grease on the wallpaper and faux gilt sconce recently procured from Home Depot.

“With its classical columns, mirrors, faux gold and white marble everything, the Trinity compound’s look is ‘Gone With the Wind’ meets Caesars Palace,” The Times wrote in 1998.

And then there is “faux pas,” which is an embarrassing blunder or lapse of good manners.

With the American West no longer lonely and unpopulated, the wind-scattered weeds have collided, quite literally, with the faux mansions and exurban retreats of transplants escaping the winter chill of New England or Canada.

Mr. Kerrigan’s faux pas could have been worse: He could have told his daughter that she was “one in a million”—which, in this country, means there are 347 others just like her.