mountebankery
nounEtymology From mountebank + -ery.
1
The practices of a mountebank; quackery; boastful and vain pretenses.
- I have already alluded to "strawing," which can hardly be described as quackery. It is rather a piece of mountebankery. […] The strawer offers to sell any passer by in the streets a straw and give the purchaser a paper which he dares not sell. Accordingly as he judges of the character of his audience, so he intimates that the paper is political, libellous, irreligious, or indecent.1851, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: