Editor,
In a troubled time, language sometimes offers the consolation of an almost prescient accuracy, as in the word “trumpery.” Derived from a French word meaning “to deceive, cheat,” its first definition is “deceit, fraud, imposture, trickery.” The second definition is “something of less value than it seems; hence, ‘something of no value; trifles’; trash, rubbish.”
The word worked for Shakespeare, Milton, De Foe, and Dr. Johnson. I suggest we use it now, acknowledging that our wildly impulsive and shallow “so-called” (to use his own words) president is a man whose whole life amounts, (as Dr. Johnson wrote as part of his definition of “trumpery”) to “Something fallaciously splendid.” Speaking accurately, the grotesque man with the orange face and the yellow hair is serving us up nothing but a great mess of pure trumpery.
David Zimmermann