Ersatz

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.

The crowd wandered out to a huge party on the ersatz city blocks of the Paramount lot.