What these people have in common, she thought, is the ability to use words like 'truth' and 'evil'without embarrassment or meretriciousness.

The shop-windows were full of goods; Lalette could hardly pause to inspect, but from the distance, they had an air of meretriciousness and false luxury.

This and "Deep in My Heart, Dear" don't make the piece into something admirable, but they do redeem it from manipulative meretriciousness.

It is unfortunately all too common an experience to see so-called expert work resulting in a garish meretriciousness quite unsuitable for, and unworthy of, the original book.

These days the most ardent apostles for art roll up their sleeves, hold their noses against the meretriciousness of the marketplace and practice a little economic determinism.

Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family.

True, Warhol caught the meretriciousness of late 20th-century life, and his repetitive paintings of dollar signs, for instance, could be construed as an indictment of our society's prime priority.

As these denigrations pile up, even though outweighed by the many kudos (and three Pulitzer Prizes), clouds of meretriciousness gather over the Albee oeuvre that Mr. Gussow never dispels.