How to Use rube in a Sentence

rube

noun

• They treated us as if we were a bunch of rubes.
• The whole thing took on a grifter-and-rube dynamic at the worst moment.
  — Joe Delessio, Curbed, 15 Apr. 2021
• Salt was my friend, too, because to undersalt something is to be a rube.
  — Washington Post, 3 Mar. 2021
• Some are charlatans soaking the rubes for a few drachmas.
  — David Sturm, Columbia Flier, 15 Sep. 2017
• The men are rubes, boobs, and boors, except for the one or two good guys who aren’t, and Isabelle will manage to mess those relationships up.
  — Ty Burr, BostonGlobe.com, 9 May 2018
• How did these shows about rural rubes become such a beloved part of imagined American life in the 1960s and beyond?
  — Sara K. Eskridge, Houston Chronicle, 19 Aug. 2019
• Being a rube, though, Lucien cannot carry off the performance.
  — Kyle Smith, WSJ, 9 June 2022
• Being poor does not make one a rube or insensitive to talent.
  — Philip Martin, Arkansas Online, 6 Nov. 2022
• Maybe some lingering guilt is what causes Lindsay to tell Kim, like a rube, that her parents have banned them from being friends.
  — Roxana Hadadi, Vulture, 16 Feb. 2021
• Red has utter disdain for Jerry, looking at him as a rube who exists only to help maintain Red’s place at the top of the pyramid.
  — Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone, 14 Mar. 2022
• He was terrified of being a rube, like Rousseau, celebrated and dismissed all at once.
  — Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 9 May 2022
• But a lot of the humor is cruel and cynical, for the sake of being cruel and cynical, and even more of it points and laughs at the rubes, provoking them simply to provoke them.
  — Todd Vanderwerff, Vox, 15 July 2018
• There will be the standard green propaganda photos and videos of the refuge's beautiful southern locales again being passed off to the rubes as the windblown tundra of the barren coastal plain.
  — Paul Jenkins, Anchorage Daily News, 6 Jan. 2018
• Its narrator is Lou Ford, a 29-year-old Texas sheriff who pretends to be a bland and boring rube but ends up committing every murder in the novel.
  — Susanna Lee, The Conversation, 6 Aug. 2020
• After decades of being played for a rube by local sports-team owners, and poorly served by its own bungling, groveling politicians, Oakland folks got a win.
  — Scott Ostler, SFChronicle.com, 22 Aug. 2020
• Thalberg robbed the Marx Brothers of their anarchy and Keaton of his elegance, turning him, as Stevens complains, into a mere stock rube figure.
  — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 24 Jan. 2022
• Not wanting to be seen as cultural rubes, other pets are also getting in on the animal art gallery trend, including a gecko, a turtle, birds, and a guinea pig.
  — Hilary Shenfeld, PEOPLE.com, 21 Apr. 2020
• The grizzled veterans of investing always have ways of expressing their disdain for the rubes who buy tech stocks at inflated values.
  — Aaron Pressman, Fortune, 10 July 2017
• That does not sit well with some, who dismiss Proposition 1 proponents as ignorant rubes and religious zealots.
  — Paul Jenkins, Anchorage Daily News, 17 Mar. 2018
• Poker sharks find the rube, and that’s what Belichick appeared to do in trading with inexperienced Panthers leadership during last year’s draft.
  — Tom Krasovic, San Diego Union-Tribune, 17 Oct. 2022
• All across the Internet, people were laughing at the apparent rube from Louisiana who didn't even know the definition of leaking.
  — Jarvis Deberry, NOLA.com, 12 June 2017
• Macdonald liked to portray himself as a rube from small-town Canada, yet could conjure opinions on such matters as the merits of competing Proust translations.
  — New York Times, 25 Dec. 2021
• In response to each new medium’s persuasive power, a healthy popular response ridiculing the rubes falling for the spectacle has arisen.
  — Michael J. Socolow, Smithsonian, 11 May 2018
• Birdy is the straw stirring this drink, in ways that frequently reduce her to a caricature as an impossibly naïve and frequently narrow-minded rube.
  — Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 22 Sep. 2017
• My former friends and relatives believe President Trump to be a boorish, unethical rube.
  — WSJ, 23 July 2017
• Whereas Trump’s ten-word answers represent the full depth of his intellect, Sanders is hardly some anti-intellectual rube.
  — Graham Vyse, New Republic, 13 Sep. 2017
• Never again will your beautiful holiday photos be mucked up by those unphotogenic rubes.
  — Pstatz, WIRED, 21 July 2006
• This was serious stuff, and anyone who thought that ruminating on Melania Trump’s choice of shoes was appropriate is nothing more than a pathetic rube, right up there with the critics who made fun of Michelle Obama’s upper arm strength.
  — Christine M. Flowers, Philly.com, 31 Aug. 2017
• Pac-Man Battle Casino adds the potential for a classic-gaming hustler to lure in unsuspecting rubes with fake humility before unleashing their skills on a big bet.
  — Kyle Orland, Ars Technica, 28 Sep. 2017
• Think hunter-gatherers, Crusaders, shrieking Dothraki hordes, or, more reasonably, Dust Bowl circus carnies, traveling town to town, entertaining (and swindling) the rubes.
  — Charlton Pettus, New York Times, 16 Oct. 2019

Last Updated: 5 Sep 2024