meretriciousness
- n an appearance of truth that is false or deceptive; seeming plausibility
- n tasteless showiness
- Reading it becomes a suspenseful exercise in disbelief, in which the reader is sustained, as well as stunned, by Cain's inexhaustible capacity for compounding meretriciousness.
- He has stormed at pretension and what he considers meretriciousness or bad taste.