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When you employ artifice, you use clever tricks and cunning to deceive someone.
An autonomous person makes their own decisions without being influenced by anyone else; an autonomous country or organization is independent and has the power to govern itself.
A cabal is a group of people who secretly meet to plan things in order to gain power.
Candor is the quality of being honest and open in speech or action.
Something that is clandestine is hidden or kept a secret, often because it is illegal.
If you collude with people, you work secretly with them to do something dishonest.
Complicity is the involvement in or knowledge of a situation that is illegal or bad.
A conclave is a meeting between a group of people who discuss something secretly.
Two people concordant with each other are in agreement or harmony.
If you are culpable for an action, you are held responsible for something wrong or bad that has happened.
Someone who is disingenuous is not straightforward or is dishonest in what they say or do.
If you exculpate someone, you prove that they are not guilty of a crime.
When someone is exonerated from guilt, a task, or a responsibility, they are set free or excused from it.
If someone behaves in a furtive way, they do things sneakily and secretly in order to avoid being noticed.
To gerrymander a voting district is to change its physical boundaries in order to include more people who vote in a particular way.
People who are ingenuous are excessively trusting and believe almost everything that people tell them, especially because they have not had much life experience.
Something innocuous is not likely to offend or harm anyone.
A machination is a secretive plan or clever plot that is carefully designed to control events or people.
If you are oblivious to something that is happening, you do not notice it.
An overt act is not hidden or secret but is done in an open and public way.
A patent situation is one that is wide open and unconcealed; it is both evident and obvious.
Probity is very moral and honest behavior.
Propriety is behaving in a socially acceptable and appropriate way.
To be punctilious is to pay precise attention to detail.
A scrupulous person takes great care to do everything in an extremely honest, conscientious, and fair manner.
Something statutory, such as the power given to a governor or president, is created, established, and controlled by rules and laws; hence, it has the full force of the law behind it and must be followed.
If you employ subterfuge, you use a secret plan or action to get what you want by outwardly doing one thing that cleverly hides your true intentions.
A surreptitious deed is done secretly to avoid bringing any attention to it.
Synergy is the extra energy or additional effectiveness gained when two groups or organizations combine their efforts instead of working separately.
A tacit agreement between two people is understood without having to use words to express it.
If you wangle something out of someone, you manage to get it by cleverly persuading or tricking that person.
Verb
connive
kuh-NAHYV
Context
There once was a famous case of baggage handlers who secretly schemed or connived to smuggle illegal green gophers into the luggage of innocent travelers. The baggage handlers at one airport connived or plotted to put the sleeping gophers into marked suitcases. At the receiving end, the other conniving and dishonestly cooperating handlers would look out for the marked luggage pieces and extract the gophers before the pieces of luggage went off to customs to be inspected.
Quiz:Try again!
When have you connived with someone?
When you cooperate with them in an ongoing investigation.
When you agree to work together on an upcoming project.
When you plot with them to do something against the law.
Nightly Conduct Veiled The brothers connived so successfully because their conduct was veiled by night
Examples
One of Warren’s obsessions in the book, reflected in both movies, is the dilemma that arises when moral people connive with the immoral to try to do good.
—
Los Angeles Times
"If [a government] was weak and temperate, it would resort to violence only at the last extremity and would connive at many partial acts of insubordination; then the state would gradually fall into anarchy."
—
The Atlantic
When Kenny comes upon some movie reviews by Roger Ebert, which he considers brilliant, he's moved, at age 18—sofa surfing and just fired from Home Depot—to connive to meet the critic.
—
USA Today
