Crossword clues for mummery
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Mummery \Mum"mer*y\, n.; pl. Mummeries. [F. momerie, of Dutch or German origin. See Mumm.]
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Masking; frolic in disguise; buffoonery.
The mummery of foreign strollers.
--Fenton. Farcical show; hypocritical disguise and parade or ceremonies.
--Bacon.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1520s, "performance of mumming," from Old French mommerie, from momer (see mummer). Transferred sense of "ridiculous ceremony or ritual" is from 1540s.
Wiktionary
n. 1 merrymaking; the performance of a mummer 2 a ridiculous or ostentatious ceremony, especially of a religious nature 3 a showy but empty performance
WordNet
n. meaningless ceremonies and flattery [syn: flummery]
Wikipedia
Mummery may refer to:
- Christmas Mummering
- Performance of a Mummers Play.
- Albert F. Mummery (1855–1895), British mountaineer
- Browning Mummery (Opera tenor) (1888–1974), Australian operatic tenor
- Browning Mummery (Electronic sound works), stage name of Andrew Lonsdale (born 1961), Australian electronic musician
- Eddie Mummery, English football player
- James Howard Mummery, a British biologist and source of the eponymous Pink tooth of Mummery
- John Mummery, English appeal court justice
Usage examples of "mummery".
It is to this accidental banishment to Devon that we owe the cluster of exquisite pieces descriptive of obsolete rural manners and customs--the Christmas masks, the Twelfth-night mummeries, the morris-dances, and the May-day festivals.
We cooked and shopped together, went out to the Odeon or drank in the Mummery bar but our relationship was a curious one.
The scene would be rehearsed several times before Sultan, tired of mummery and eager for actualities, slunk yawling into the bush, while Baal Burra, whimpering in the dusk, waddled home to be caged.
It was very long, made up of rites which however gorgeous, to me were but mummeries, ending in a kind of sacramental feast whereat all of us from Pharaoh down, must touch with our lips a broth compounded from the flesh of the dead Apis, the smell of which broth--for taste it I did not--revolted me.
There were classic affectations in England, there were masks and mummeries and classic puerilities at court and in noble houses--Elizabeth's court would well have liked to be classical, remarks Guizot--but Shakespeare was not fettered by classic conventionalities, nor did he obey the unities, nor attempt to separate on the stage the tragedy and comedy of life-- "immense and living stage," says the writer I like to quote because he is French, upon which all things are represented, as it were, in their solid form, and in the place which they occupied in a stormy and complicated civilization.
They had come expecting the kind of cultism and mummery Mother Sukra had done.
This debases Shakespeare, and debases me, and is far above the level of this front-parlour mummery, and infinitely beyond the hysterical response of the Sniffer when I caught him in bed with my wife.
This ironical leave taking left me stupefied with astonishment, and well I presaged my coming disgrace from the absurd mummery the chancellor had thought fit to play off.