According to Merriam-Webster, something is meretricious if it has the nature of prostitution, is tawdrily and falsely attractive, or is superficially significant (not funny or obvious). Wasn’t it their word of the day on February 11, 2013? What do you use the word “music” to describe music intended to appeal to the audience?

A lot of Google Books suggests that the word is mostly used in legal contexts or in style manuals discussing the word itself. What is the remark that the puny unhorsed figure watches quietly with the precarious and meretricious cleverness of animals balanced on their hinder legs; that cleverness which animal is so fatuously proud and which constantly betrays him by means of natural laws like gravity? (I only found this passage cited in other books; perhaps the full text of Light in August is not yet available online.) The

word is also in Johnson’s dictionary, but of course that takes up back a while.

In The History Boys: A Play By Alan Bennett, a character uses the word and then must explain what he meant by it.

I don’t think that the proper noun is important to the distinction here, which is between the indicative and subjunctive mode. Of as used here, was is indicative, while were is subjunctive and the better word to follow “I wish. This would still be the case if a common noun was involved instead of John. I wish my wife was here, not “I wish my wife was here.” “But I suppose that many native speakers ignore this distinction and was is common in this context.