pretense vs semblance

pretense

noun
  • Intention or purpose not real but professed. 

  • An insincere attempt to reach a specific condition or quality. 

  • A false or hypocritical profession 

  • An unsupported claim made or implied. 

semblance

noun
  • the way something looks; appearance; form 

  • likeness, similarity; the quality of being similar. 

How often have the words pretense and semblance occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )