I fear that I inroduced the term "claptrap" to this discussion, though a search indicates it is in common use in other treads.
Thalassamania in post 177:
So are you saying that we should all be subject to their fundamentalist claptrap, that our children's education should be disrupted and that they should be lied to, and that society should move retrograde, because some amongst us choose to wear blinders?
Claptrap’s first appearance in print is in Nathan Bailey’s dictionary of 1721 and his definition pretty much tells the whole story: “A Clap Trap, a name given to the rant and rhimes that dramatick poets, to please the actors, let them get off with: as much as to say, a trap to catch a clap, by way of applause from the spectators at a play.”
Such rhetorical devices or acting flourishes were thought unworthy of the serious dramatist or thespian. A writer in
The New-England Magazine in 1835, fulminating against the star system that was contributing to the decline of the modern drama, complained that in order to feed the performance of the lead actor, “The piece must abound in clap-traps”. Nor was the technique confined to the theatre itself: an article in
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1855 about a new play said that “All the clap-traps of the press were employed to draw an audience to the first representation.” And in 1867, back across the Atlantic in London, Thomas Wright wrote in
Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes that: “The Waggoner’s entertainment, of course, embraced the usual unauthenticated statistics, stock anecdotes, and pieces of clap-trap oratory of the professional teetotal lecturers.”
The word developed from a figurative theatrical device to encourage applause into a more general term for showy or insincere platitudes or mawkish sentimentality directed at the lowest common denominator of one’s audience. From there it was only a short step to the sense of talking nonsense or rubbish, though the older ideas are often still present.