The word 'phonies' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to people or things pretending to be something they are not. For example, "That politician was just trying to win the votes of the people; he was nothing but a phony."
Like Salinger's own dangling men — Holden Caulfield, Buddy and Seymour Glass — Merton set himself against phonies as a way of setting against phoniness in himself.
Business iconoclasts he admired, but he hated sycophancy ("Why not just send them a nice lacy valentine and forget the prose?"), and once considered a cover story on phonies who had made it to the top.
Portable property Net effect Celebration, and concern Home truths Reprints Related items Guns in China: The wild eastNov 8th 2001 Counterfeiting in Asia: Phonies galoreNov 8th 2001 China and the WTO: Ready for the competition?Sep 13th 2001All the same, much of this investment is going into an export sector that has been badly hit by the worldwide slump.
"I have no tolerance for people that are phonies.
Upon resigning he became a leader of those whom Truman privately described as the "Reds, phonies and the parlour pinks" that he feared were "a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin".
When he said that she should get rid of the man, she said that he was all she had, and that she always fell for phonies and lushes because he had been one.
Salinger is imagined to have given voice to what every adolescent, or, at least, every sensitive, intelligent, middle-class adolescent, thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham, and that successful people are mostly phonies.
He was drawn to the Nicaraguan, whom he considered someone real on a machine — despite the heavy Central American accent, Dad had found his Rust Belt guy out here among all the phonies in cowboy hats.
Yet his silly and sordid public error in tweeting an intimate photograph paid off in the kind of derision we give not just to sinners but to phonies.
Like most seasoned phonies, I roundly suspect that everyone is as disingenuous as I am.
Sentimental satirists — Tom Wolfe, for example — just hate the kind of people it is normal to hate: hypocrites, phonies, bullies, and narcissists.
