flummery
Americannoun
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flummeries
plural
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oatmeal or flour boiled with water until thick.
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fruit custard or blancmange usually thickened with cornstarch.
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any of various dishes made of flour, milk, eggs, sugar, etc.
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complete nonsense; foolish humbug.
noun
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informal meaningless flattery; nonsense
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a cold pudding of oatmeal, etc
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of flummery
1615–25; < Welsh llymru, with ending assimilated to -ery
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Anything we could do to stop this flummery from clogging our airwaves, inboxes and video streams would probably be worse than the problem itself.
From Fox News ● Jun. 12, 2020
His career in flummery and flimflam was launched when he left reform school at age 14 to work as a Coney Island pitchman, then joined Dr. W.H.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 8, 2018
There was, of course, plenty of mildly baffling flummery, and I particularly enjoyed seeing the Lord Mayor of London's mourning sword, carried aloft before the Queen and Prince Philip as they walked into St Paul's.
From BBC ● Apr. 18, 2013
It is not encrusted, as most modern arenas are, with the flummery of franchises and corporate hospitality, much of which is housed in separate pavilions at ground level.
From The Guardian ● May 19, 2012
It sounded like a lot of flummery to Drave, but what did he know?
From "Strange the Dreamer" by Laini Taylor
Dishes included white soup, partridge pie and jelly desserts or flummeries.
From BBC ● May 10, 2013
It would have been filled with fruit, flummeries or blancmanges, biscuits, gateaux, jellies and ice cream.
From BBC ● May 10, 2013
There were plenty of ways to do this; all sorts of accounting flummeries had already been perpetrated, but a final tweak was needed.
From Time Magazine Archive
The flattery, handholding and creative fudgery that are at the heart of diplomacy are the very sort of fancy-pants flummeries that the President abhors.
From Time Magazine Archive
Great men are not always wise; even intellectual veterans like Dr. Johnson, and others I can mention, if you only give me time, have their hallucinations, fads, fancies, and flummeries.
From Our Bessie by Carey, Rosa Nouchette
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
