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• n  a false or unsupportable quality
• n  an artful or simulated semblance
• n  pretending with intention to deceive
• n  imaginative intellectual play
• n  the act of giving a false appearance

• It practically abandoned all pretence on the part of the Great Powers to protect the Christians in Turkey, cardinal point of Gladstone's eastern policy.
• We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.
• Armed with the hardest-hitting prose of the century, he has used his skill and power to smash rose-colored spectacles right left, to knock many a genteel pretence into a .

• pretension
• pretense
• guise
• pretext
• feigning
• dissembling
• make-believe
• pretending
• simulation

News & Articles

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• If Edward Snowden Is a Criminal, Why Aren’t the Rest of Us Criminals As Well?
  “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical.
  June 11, 2013 - The Gilmer Mirror

Quotes

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• Norman Tebbit in The Christian Institute
  Lord Tebbit, former Conservative Party chairman, criticised the idea, saying: "I wouldn't want anything done to add to the pretence that a civil partnership is a marriage. That's the key thing, and anything which changes the law would have to come...
• Alex Salmond in BBC News
  Mr Salmond said the BBC's decision was "a democratic disgrace". "Today's decision shows that the BBC has given up all pretence of being a national broadcaster for Scotland, he added. Fairness and impartiality have been thrown out of the...
• James Hansen in Aljazeera.net
  James Hansen, a scientist from Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said it is "a pretence that [industrialised nations] understand the problem."