Sentence examples for a mere pretense from inspiring English sources

But that is a mere pretense.

The imitator's mispronunciations are recognized as mere pretense; this knowledge makes sympathy unnecessary and enables the audience to be childishly cruel with a clean conscience.

Ostensibly this was a concert — her first in New York in several years, she noted — but her songs were mere pretense, compared with the night's myriad other functions: runway show, theater performance, assertion of social dominance.

In my scholarly field of political theory, radical critiques of constitutional democracy (whether Marxist, Foucauldian, feminist, Freudian, or post-structuralist) commonly contend that the rule of law is a sham, a pretense, a mere cover for underlying or overarching power interests.

A year earlier it showed a mere 1% rise.

"The time has come to drop the empty pretense that we can serve the region as a mere broker," Mr. DeLay said.

A mere chardonnay, perhaps.

A mere $1 billion.