meretricious

He was thinking of his own self; he hankered after the meretricious glory of a showy performance.

I respect and applaud your indifference to fine poetry when you can contemplate the meretricious charms of this young person."

The whole mechanical outlook upon life, as she had known it, seemed, even in those few seconds, to become a false and meretricious thing.

It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do.

And at the same time, with true lover's anxiety, Sheldon feared that the other might somehow fail to blunder, and win the girl with purely fortuitous and successful meretricious show.

The books on her father's shelves, the paintings on the walls, the music on the piano - all was just so much meretricious display.

So far as richness, delicacy, and wildness of flavour, and substantial nourishment were concerned, the viand might well have claimed a decided superiority over the meretricious cookery and laboured compounds of the most renowned artist; though the service of the dainty was certainly achieved in a manner far from artificial.

I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it--to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace--and it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like a fostering sunbeam.

The same may be said, my dear fellow, for the effect of some of these little sketches of yours, which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does upon your retaining in your own hands some factors in the problem which are never imparted to the reader.

That meretricious splendour was the only one to be met in Mrs Verloc's visions.

Yet it was Raffles who was the life and soul of the party, and that not by meretricious virtue of his cricket.

If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect.