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Ersatz
"Ersatz" in a Sentence (16 examples)
They didn't have real coffee, so they drank ersatz.
Even the ersatz of the flies imposed their menu on us, the content of which I will not have to bellow.
"Macau-Macau!" exclaimed Michael, the Guǎngzhōu Man, when we were thinking about Tagalog and the Philippines, as we were sitting at Lulu Island's Tim Hortons café, after 10:00, June 15, 2025. "Malaki?" I wondered if he was referring to the word for "big." I asserted: "'Lalaki' is for a man or boy, a male. 'Babae' is for a woman or girl, a female." It was déjà vu: I remembered that conversation with him from years ago. I was explaining that Tagalog words for gender alluded to size or stature. To Michael, the Philippines seems like a big Macau, the Portuguese ex-colony in the PRC, except that the Philippines is ex-Spanish. After we talked more about other subjects, Michael had to leave to pick up his kids at Sunday ESL class at posh Aberdeen Centre. At the café, Alex, my Filipino friend, reminded me about Mass times: Well before 15:00, I ventured walking in the blue-sky sunshine to the "Clam Temple," the Roman Catholic church on St. Albans Road. In the great worship hall, there were just a Filipina nun in her nun outfit and two women church co-workers at the front. I was sitting way back. Feeling the void was all that was necessary, except that one of the ladies started using a handheld vacuum cleaner to clean underneath the votive candle stands, where some candles were lit. I exited to the nice sunshine, as I sat on a bench. I'm Buddhoanimist as many Asians. The "Clam Temple" is a good ersatz for me. It was likely my 44th visit this year for me there. Ah, the void...
Back then, we could only get ersatz coffee.
In these days of “rolled” gold, electro-plate, and undetectable pearls, it is curious that almost the only honest Ersatz material known to the goldsmith's art should be utterly forgotten.
Ersatzgas, Ersatzpfennige. Ersatz has become a brave word in Germany. As a substantive it means War Reparations. As part of compounded words it means substitute.
“There we are, you see! No discipline, no backbone! Have you by any chance any discipline, sir? Have you any character? Everything is fake. Everything is ersatz [translating German Ersatz]—vulgarity is everywhere I look.”
They forge documents indicating that Winston Churchill plotted World War I; they manufacture an ersatz fossil suggesting that humans have been around as long as apes; they create a pseudo-Gospel supposedly written by Paul in which he claims that Jesus never performed miracles..
The avant-garde's opposite number, in Greenberg's scheme, is kitsch, "ersatz culture"—art for capitalism's new man (who turns out to be no different from Fascism's or Communism's new man).
The NATO visitors watched an ersatz eighteenth-century dance (complete with powdered wigs and simulated copulation) that might have been considered obscene had it not been so amusing.
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The crowd wandered out to a huge party on the ersatz city blocks of the Paramount lot.
If all goes according to plan, the ersatz city hall will soon be relocated to a former lumber warehouse in the San Diego suburb of Chula Vista, at which point construction on the rest of Town Square will start.
The important point I want to emphasize here is that, regardless of a Government agency's conception of what a consumer expects of a food item, by and large the consumer detests the use of chemicals in foods as substitutes for nutritious, wholesome natural ingredients which improve flavor and quality. The consumer has little to gain in purchasing a product containing questionable ersatzes if his life is to be endangered or he will suffer ill effects.
What intrigues us is what will happen when the ersatzes for the ersatzes come along. Will characters start substituting for actors, bona fide dogs for barking ladies; will people start looking at people again instead of television and at nature instead of at documentaries?
They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.
“You do Berlin a disservice, baron. We too have mastered a few things: ersatzes, for instance, and the metaphysics of fictionalism—”
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