tomfoolery

Alas, this tomfoolery leads him off course: He arrives in heaven, but at the wrong gate.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 11, 2026

On the surface, this is simply the kind of weird tomfoolery you’d expect from the early 1900s.

From Slate ● Jun. 24, 2026

Cue a medley of exquisite tomfoolery, featuring bawdy badinage, dubious love-poems, mistaken identity, visual gags, a chaotic play-within-a-play and lots of linguistic whimsy.

From New York Times ● May 2, 2024

He told the court this was a case of "skylarking and tomfoolery" that had "gone awry".

From BBC ● Nov. 9, 2023

When Jean Louise felt apprehensive, expectant, or on edge, especially when confronting her aunt, her brain clicked to the meter of Gilbertian tomfoolery.

From "Go Set a Watchman: A Novel" by Harper Lee

For 11 seasons, Bravo’s “Vanderpump Rules” has followed the triumphs, tragedies and tomfooleries of a group of Hollywood 20-something nobodies who became 30-something wannabes as the show became a reality TV juggernaut.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 31, 2024

Such formal prose does not entirely squelch the sort of tomfooleries that Pynchon devotees so eagerly search out.

From Time Magazine Archive

No, such tomfooleries are limited to this insane world.

From Works of John Bunyan — Volume 03 by John Bunyan

I’ll have no such profligacy in Romford; poor people shall not be wheedled out of their money by your tomfooleries.

From Curiosities of Impecuniosity by H. G. Somerville

The old greffier, then, came to Paris for the purpose of witnessing one of the sad tomfooleries of that unhappy profligate, who in better times had been his son.

From The International Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, November 1, 1851 by Various