smoke screen

Use Smoke screen in a sentence

noun

a mass of dense smoke produced to conceal an area, vessel, or plane from the enemy.

something intended to disguise, conceal, or deceive; camouflage.

Origin:
1910–15

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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Link To smoke screen

Collins

World English Dictionary

smoke screen

—n
1.	military a cloud of smoke produced by artificial means to obscure movements or positions
2.	something said or done in order to hide the truth

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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00:10

Smoke screen is always a great word to know.

So is zedonk. Does it mean:

a fool or simpleton; ninny.

the offspring of a zebra and a donkey.

LEARN MORE UNUSUAL WORDS WITH WORD DYNAMO...

Etymonline

Word Origin & History

smoke screen

1915, as a form of military camouflage, from smoke (n.1); 1926 in the fig. sense. The association of smoke with "deception, deliberate obscurity" dates back to at least 1565.

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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Example sentences

It's a bogus smoke screen to throw up that only skew the debate in you guys favor.

Simply, clearly, with some sort of progressive story line minus a technical smoke screen.

The trial served as a useful smoke screen but it did not signify any political about-face.

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Matching Quote

"Whatever else it may be—stimulus, tranquilizer, aural nipple, too of executives, Muzak is basically trivializing. It is not simply that it relegates music to the province of wallpaper. Background music never need be banal. When it is used in support of drama, it can greatly enhance without harming itself. Mozart was entirely amenable to such films as Elvira Madigan and The French Lieutenant's Woman; Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote aptly for The Invaders, Arnold Bax for Oliver Twist, Sergei Prokofiev for Lieutenant Kije and Alexander Nevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich for others. In such uses, music collaborates with artists, it becomes an art among arts. But Muzak collaborates chiefly with management: it is used as an aural smoke-screen, a form of jamming, a hormone in the henhouse, an emollient in cemeteries."

-Norman Corwin

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