The phrase "a mask for a" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing something that conceals or disguises the true nature of something else, often in a metaphorical sense.
Example: "The cheerful demeanor was just a mask for a deep-seated sadness that he couldn't express."
Alternatives: "a facade for a" or "a cover for a".
But sometimes the cult of the ordinary is just a mask for a complete lack of imagination.
There are painted elements, along with a real kimono, wooden balls, and a figure made of sticks with a mask for a head – but so what?
An embellished style can also be a lazy and imprecise style, taking us further away from the subject at hand rather than magnifying it; and linguistic profusion can be a mask for a privation of feeling or experience.
Democrats and voting rights advocates argue that poll-watching efforts are only one part of a larger Republican effort to discourage or block racial minorities from voting – and that Republican concerns over "voter fraud" are simply a mask for a broad campaign of racial disenfranchisement.
Thinking back on it, though, I'm surprised to find that it's something quieter and smarter that persists: the tenuousness of Pine's grip on moral clarity, and the constant sense that his charm may be a mask for a void every bit as deep as Roper's own.
Depending on the opcode, the 1 byte value would either be explicity written into the location or be used as a mask for an and/or/not/xor function on the referenced location in display memory.
Using self-assembled nanospheres as a mask for an electroless plating of metals such as Cu and Ag on the Si substrate, the patterning of an ordered honeycomb structure and a hexagonally arranged convex array of metals on Si was also developed by the combination of colloidal crystal patterning and wet chemical etching.
Much has been made of the dubious health claims forwarded by food bloggers advocating a clean eating lifestyle: how this ultra-disciplined approach to eating can in itself be a mask for an eating disorder, whether anorexia or bulimia or orthorexia.
It showed a mask for anesthesia, not a ventilator.
Its platitudes were a mask for radicalism rather than an end in themselves.
