What is "pretense"

Usage examples of "pretense".

But the pretense would be useless: she had made a stand and forbidden this annulment, and everyone would know she had been defeated.

By now, I thought I had detected more genuine than simulated modesty in her reactions, and I had no doubt that the emotional excitement of the moment had begun to carry this secretly eager masochist into an actual involvement with her role, one that far transcended the feigned pretense which she had thus far conveyed.

Sixth Cause of Action charges naked theft of characters and sequences to be found nowhere in material presented in discovery as from the public domain, in his Seventh Cause of Action which is against Kiester and his head writer Knize only, plaintiff claims misrepresentation, deceit and fraudulent conduct in the misappropriation and conversion of copyrighted material on deposit at certain public institutions, and of material obtained under false pretenses from plaintiff some years earlier.

The incident at the muskeg portage was proof that Alphonse had made false pretense of his familiarity with this district.

His expression was angelic and open, without a trace of cultivated politesse or pretense.

Observing that she was not using her napkin, Dan flirted his, on pretense of straightening it out, and respread it.

Whoever faced a Roman gladiator under the critical gaze of a crowd that knew all the points of fighting and could instantly detect, and did instantly resent pretense, fraud, trickery, the poor condition of one combatant or the unwillingness of one man to have at another in deadly earnest, had to be not only in the pink of bodily condition but a fighter such as no drunken sensualist could ever hope to be.

Okay, he seemed knowledgeable about shipbuilding, but did he have to keep up the pretense of being a Viking?

There had been no pretense about that, for I had seen the swazzle stuck deep in his throat, and in any event he could not have known that I had some nursing experience that would bring me to his aid.

Eric would go through some pretense of verifying the information, and then tell the caller that the identifying information had been confirmed, and ask for the details of what the caller wanted to find out from the DMV.

For again as in 1788 and 1796, Hamilton was throwing his weight into the contest to tip the balance against Adams, except this time there was no pretense of secrecy.

He scratched his checking board, making some sort of pretense not clear to me, but plainly a form of hypocrisy, a ruse from the depths of his brummagem soul, scratching away like a rat, an uncultured rat, and I hated him so much I could have bitten off his finger and spat it in his face.

Haverford was still knitting placidly, where the Chris Valentines were quarreling under pretense of raillery, where Toots Hayden was smoking a cigaret in a corner and smiling up at Graham, and where Natalie, exquisite and precise, was supervising the laying out of a bridge table.

His pretense was humanitarianism, his result was unlimited finance-capitalism over a continent, his technique was the spoils-system.

No power with any pretenses of goodness or justice could ever have brought an innocent like Malika here only to be pointlessly and cruelly slaughtered as part of its obscure plan for Von Kharkov and Morphayus.