Sham Phrases

Phrases

• A class act
• Act of God
• Act out
• Act the fool
• Act the giddy goat
• Act the part
• Act up
• Act white
• Act your age
• All is vanity
• Assume nothing
• Balancing act
• Bear false witness
• Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey (Keanu Reeves movie)
• Caught in the act
• Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends! (line from the movie 25th Hour)
• Class act
• Clean up your act
• Con artist
• Couldn't act his way out of a paper bag
• Do a disappearing act
• Double act
• Fake it till you make it
• Fake the funk
• False alarm
• False dawn
• False friends
• False jeopardy (plot device in TV melodramas where danger is threatened only for it to be found to be a false alarm)
• False memory syndrome
• False modesty
• False pretences
• False prophet

• Foot in the bucket (A baseball expression meaning to act timidly or cowardly)
• Funny money
• Get in on the act
• Get your act together
• Hard act to follow
• High wire act
• Human Rights Act
• In on the act
• Lulled into a false sense of security
• Phone it in (perform an act in an uncommitted disinterested manner)
• Play hardball (A baseball expression meaning to be or act tough or aggressive)
• Put on an act
• Random act of kindness
• Read the riot act
• Ring false
• Sailing under false colours
• Sexton Blake (Cockney rhyming slang for fake)
• Sister Act (Whoopie Goldberg movie)
• Smell the Glove (fictional album by the spoof heavy-metal band Spinal Tap)
• The Fake Sheikh (Nickname of journalist Mazher Mahmood)
• The act you've known for all these years (Beatles song lyric)
• The cat who doesn't act finicky soon loses control of his owner (9 Lives Cat Food advertising slogan)
• Think global, act local
• Think globally, act locally (Friends of the Earth advertising slogan)
• To assume makes an ass out of u and me
• Triple play (A baseball expression denoting the act of making three outs during the same play)
• Two faced
• Two-faced
• Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray book)
• Vanity publishing
• Vanity thy name is woman
• Woolly Bully (Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs song)
• You Can't Con An Honest John (Mike Skinner - The Streets song)