Barnum's specimen, but are all one colour and certainly answer to the description of White Elephant much better." (43) Taking cues from the opinions offered by Laverick and other correspondents, The Times veered between enthusiastic endorsement of the elephant and derision of Barnum's
humbuggery. Other newspapers quoted The Times in their reporting of the elephant's sojourn in London.
What in the fershlugginer
humbuggery is going on here?
Promoters played on European perceptions of America as a cultural backwater with hyperbole and sensationalistic advertising, which came to be known as "humbug." Boston critic John Sullivan Dwight and others denounced such
humbuggery, while praising de Meyer's pianism, if not his repertoire, which tended toward flashy bravura pieces, including fantasies on popular and operatic tunes of the day--music sure to please crowds, but less satisfying to the cognoscenti.
These sessions contain enough opposite intensities, enough fruitful tension emerging from the wasteful
humbuggery, that any fan with a few bootlegs, minimal mixing technology and some imagination can construct an alternative that would expose Naked for the compromise of a compromise that it is.
Washington Post reporter Hedley Donovan dismissed this aspect of FDR's acceptance speech as "painful
humbuggery" (Goodwin 1994, 134).
Others will read it as a grim tale of
humbuggery. At one point, Friedman herself pronounces Dr.
Comedy, in particular, according to Wilson Carey McWilliams, exposes
humbuggery, and hence is "radically dangerous" to those who would "drive us into community by necessity or terror." Throughout the ages, it has poked fun at the wholesale attempts to reshape people through social engineering and is, not surprisingly, the bane of all totalitarian leaders and political systems.(14) This is even more true, obviously, of satire.
The historical Jesus, sifted from the mythic figure of triune
humbuggery, threatened mammon with eternal damnation.
Each galaxy would evolve a species of rational beings, scornful of superstition, hocuspocus, and
humbuggery of every ilk." He sighed.