Sentence examples for a substitute for something from inspiring English sources

First of all it was a substitute for something – wood – and it looked ugly to our eyes.

Your author would observe, of course, that the pies are a substitute for something else that Eugenia is trying to give her son, as his hostility to the pies is a refusal to receive it.

Still, what we have here is a painful combination: her sense that she was without beauty, her sense that she could not make the kind of ballets she most valued, her sense that what she did was just a substitute for something else, something more longed-for, which, inexplicably, other people had and she didn't.

He went hiking every day, and I'd watch for him coming back at dusk and it only struck me after a few days that he might be a substitute for something – that nightly family feeling; that sense of expected, and fulfilled, return.

Or so says Goodstein, who predicts that the gap between supply and demand will grow at a rate of 5% per year: "Therefore, ten years after the peak we would need a substitute for something like ten billion to fifteen billion barrels per year".

Behlmann is very good as Rodney, capturing both his sincere love of nature and Scouting while quietly hinting how this intense connection might be a substitute for something lacking in his life.

Laughing at something becomes a substitute for doing something about it.

While it certainly offers numerous insights into Adolf Hitler and the wider context that made his monstrous career possible, A. N. Wilson's "Hitler" ultimately falls short as a satisfactory substitute for something more substantial.

Or was she simply using the word "flocking" as a bowdlerized substitute for something more adjectival -- as in "where are they f*!#@ing from"?

Rasputia uses it derisively, and only derisively — as a socially-acceptable substitute for something between "How do you like them apples?" and "Up yours!" Macmac007, who obviously loathes "Norbit," suspects that my praise of the movie is "the worst kind of critical posturing nonsense".

So I agree with you: he must be trying to circumlocute and paraphrase and gloss and diagnose into existence a substitute explanation for something quite disturbing and possibly (now this is Jamesian) unnameable.