humbug

Spoto’s work is not fully dismissed, but he’s often thought of as something of an academic humbug.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 31, 2026

Boss Tweed is buried at Green-Wood, as are Jean-Michel Basquiat and Frank Morgan, who played the humbug Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 30, 2025

If holiday clutter has you more bah humbug than merry, these tips from professional organizers around Seattle might make your life easier before and after the holidays, and well into the new year.

From Seattle Times ● Dec. 15, 2023

She added: "She was 43 years without my father, 30 years without a cigarette and 20 years without a drink but never without a humbug."

From BBC ● Apr. 29, 2023

Yet there are doctors who think that Phineas is a humbug, a fake from the back woods of Vermont.

From "Phineas Gage" by John Fleischman

“He used these humbugs, as he called them, to create excitement and bring people in,” Wilson says.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 25, 2026

Joined by his wife Katie, he plunges into another assignment, as he tries to get the "spirit of Christmas" back from the dastardly humbugs.

From BBC ● Nov. 13, 2024

In Poe’s lifetime, a handful of well-connected American scientists advanced plans to build national institutions to distinguish “real working men in the way of science” from charlatans, quacks, and humbugs.

From Slate ● Aug. 2, 2021

Chronicling the history of such fakers as Smelcer, Young offers a long history of the hoax, beginning with a series of famous humbugs from P. T. Barnum’s sideshow.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 9, 2017

A reporter crowed, “It has become a settled fact that Burr’s and the Buffalo doctors’ theories are the silliest humbugs of the day.”

From "American Spirits" by Barb Rosenstock

“Because,” he added, “Although I ain’t been in the city long, I ain’t to be humbugged; it won’t do for you to try to put off your confounded mock turtles on me!”

From Slate ● Apr. 29, 2018

P. T. Barnum recorded the fact that the American people delight in being humbugged, and such is still the national mood.

From Time Magazine Archive

The sooner America knows we are not going to be humbugged the better it is.

From Time Magazine Archive

Then I saw in a moment that I had been bamboozled and humbugged; and learned, bit by bit, that the affair had been arranged long beforehand.

From The Ascent of the Matterhorn by Edward Whymper

It is incredible that intelligent people should be humbugged with such a fallacious proposition as Gresham’s so-called “law.”

From The Arena Volume 18, No. 93, August, 1897 by Various

Stranded in his "useless position" at Transport, Reith seethed while Churchill put together his "rotten" wartime coalition full of "humbugging and sycophantic" ministers.

From Time Magazine Archive

It was plainly humbug; it had the humbugging sound of a bad child crying; and about two of the afternoon we were worn out, and told him he might go.

From The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) by Robert Louis Stevenson

Well, no; that sounds like humbugging the poor creatures.

From Mad A Story of Dust and Ashes by George Manville Fenn

The latter he declared to be of the right sort; and told the waiters, there was no way of humbugging him.

From A History of Pendennis, Volume 1 His fortunes and misfortunes, his friends and his greatest enemy by William Makepeace Thackeray

Deuce take it, sir, you know you are only humbugging me,—what's the use of talking about it?”

From Uncle's dream; And The Permanent Husband by Fyodor Dostoyevsky