pretense

Related to pretense: thesaurus

by false pretenses

By or under a false impression created through intentional misrepresentation. I'm afraid you were brought here by false pretenses. I'm not your long-lost brother. You may not have lied directly, but you sold him those paintings by false pretenses—he thinks they're originals!
See also: by, false, pretense

on false pretenses

By or under a false impression created through intentional misrepresentation. I'm afraid you were brought here on false pretenses. I'm not your long-lost brother. You may not have lied directly, but you sold him those paintings on false pretenses—he thinks they're originals!
See also: false, on, pretense

under false pretenses

With a false impression created through intentional misrepresentation. I'm afraid you were brought here under false pretenses. I'm not your long-lost brother. You may not have lied directly, but you sold him those paintings under false pretenses—he thinks they're originals!
See also: false, pretense
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • by false pretenses
  • by/on/under false pretences
  • on false pretenses
  • pretence
  • under false pretenses
  • ring false
  • ring true
  • ring true/false/hollow
  • colour
  • false
References in periodicals archive
'You did by false pretense and intent to defraud, obtains the sum of N38,000,000 from one Timothy Owoeye with the pretense to organising spiritual prayer to avert his death revelation; a pretense you know to be false and thereby committed an offence contrary to section 418 and punishable under section 419 of the Criminal Code, Cap 34, Vol.
The lawyers also argued that Aquino's alleged act of 'communicating exclusively' with Purisima on the day of the raid as to the progress of Oplan Exodus through text messages was also 'not a deceitful pretense.'
Piaget did not assign moral development facilitation roles to practice play or to pretense. However, Erikson (1972) spoke strongly about the importance of pretense in young children's lives, especially as it related to expression of moral feelings, such as empathy, and behaviors, such as use of power.
A federal district court has ordered an insurer to cover the loss suffered by a law firm in a check scam, finding that the loss fell within both the policy's forgery and alteration endorsement and the policy's false pretenses exclusion and that the policy therefore was ambiguous.
The use of prompts during measurement limits conclusions about change in pretense behaviors.
The only "glue holding the Union together was pretense." Perhaps any attempt to build a single civic religion was doomed to fail and ought to have failed as the greatest pretense of all.
"Such attempts aim at restoring Syria's ability to intervene in Lebanese internal issues under the pretense of self-defense," the NLP said in a statement issued after its weekly meeting, headed by Dory Chamoun.
Isaiah's vision undoes all that kind of pretense and reduces the priest to lying on the floor in the fetal position.
Her harried mother and older sisters are exasperated but go along with her pretense, even when she leaves school and is seen as a mental case.
Launched in August were Love Becomes Herby Donna Hill; Someone to Love by Karen White-Owens, An Innocent Man by Deirdre Savoy, and A Lover's Pretense by Altonya Washington.
During debate over the measure, one congressman offered this grim recital of official abuses: "Our Army, degraded from its high position of defenders of the country from foreign and domestic foes, has been used as a police; has taken possession of polls and controlled elections; has been sent with fixed bayonets into the halls of State Legislatures in time of peace and under the pretense of threatened outbreak." The Posse Comitatus Act was intended to prevent a relapse of such outrages, as well as to fortify the critical barrier between law enforcement and the military.
Staged on the occasion of the hundred-year anniversary of the watershed formulation of E=[mc.sup.2], "Goddess in the Doorway" exuded a gravity that, for all its pretense to science, was really more about waking dreams and kinesthetic apparitions than postulated equations.
Mr: Leonard Cohen, much of the peculiar and particular world of celebrity involves pretense, and a desire to know how one appears while pretending, in order to better manipulate the pretense.