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Someone who is adroit is skillful and clever, especially in thought, behavior, or action.
When you employ artifice, you use clever tricks and cunning to deceive someone.
A canard is a piece of news or information that is false; it is deliberately spread either to harm someone or as a hoax.
Candor is the quality of being honest and open in speech or action.
You describe someone as a charlatan if they pretend to have special knowledge or skill that they don’t actually possess.
Decorous appearance or behavior is respectable, polite, and appropriate for a given occasion.
A degenerate person is immoral, wicked, or corrupt.
Something that is delusive deceives you by giving a false belief about yourself or the situation you are in.
If you say a person’s actions are despicable, you think they are extremely unpleasant or nasty.
A devious person can act in a dishonest, tricky, or secretive way for their own purposes.
Someone who is disingenuous is not straightforward or is dishonest in what they say or do.
When something is subjected to distortion, it is twisted out of shape in some way.
When you dupe another person, you trick them into believing something that is not true.
If you accuse someone of duplicity, you think that they are dishonest and are intending to trick you.
A feint is the act of pretending to make a movement in one direction while actually moving in the other, especially to trick an opponent; a feint can also be a deceptive act meant to turn attention away from one’s true purpose.
When someone is being frank, they are being honest, truthful, and completely direct about something.
If someone behaves in a furtive way, they do things sneakily and secretly in order to avoid being noticed.
Something illusory appears real or possible; in fact, it is neither.
People who are ingenuous are excessively trusting and believe almost everything that people tell them, especially because they have not had much life experience.
An irreproachable person is very honest and so morally upright that their behavior cannot be criticized.
A machination is a secretive plan or clever plot that is carefully designed to control events or people.
A mendacious person does not tell the truth.
A mountebank is a smooth-talking, dishonest person who tricks and cheats people.
A nefarious activity is considered evil and highly dishonest.
If you prevaricate, you avoid giving a direct or honest answer, usually because you want to hide the truth or want to delay or avoid making a hard decision.
Probity is very moral and honest behavior.
Propriety is behaving in a socially acceptable and appropriate way.
A rapscallion is a young rascal, naughty child, or an older person who is dishonest and a scoundrel.
You show rectitude if you behave or conduct yourself in an honest and morally correct manner.
If you think a type of behavior or idea is reprehensible, you think that it is very bad, morally wrong, and deserves to be strongly criticized.
A reprobate has a bad character and behaves in an immoral or improper way.
A ruse is a clever trick or deception used to fool someone.
A stratagem is a clever trick or deception that is used to fool someone.
A surreptitious deed is done secretly to avoid bringing any attention to it.
The veracity of something is its truthfulness.
The verity of something is the truth or reality of it.
Wiles are clever tricks or cunning schemes that are used to persuade someone to do what you want.
Noun
legerdemain
lej-er-duh-MAYN
Context
One of the oldest forms of legerdemain or sleight of hand is the shell game, where the trickster places a ball under one shell and mixes them up. This legerdemain or skill used to deceive another is so baffling because one cannot follow the shells quickly enough. Legerdemain or the art of deception has been used to great effect by banks recently in terms of hiding money borrowed on mortgages—and then once again on foreclosure documentation.
Quiz:Try again!
What is legerdemain?
It is a fancy acrobatic trick that delights a crowd.
It is a momentary lapse in concentration.
It is a highly skilled form of cunning and deceit.
LedgerDomain The US credit card companies work in a domain where they can perform legerdemain with their pens and ledgers to put their borrowers into bankruptcy.
Examples
So suspend skepticism, abandon analysis and enjoy your bafflement at “The Illusionists,” the touring Broadway show that teams seven sorcerers for more than two hours of legerdemain. It’s a magic show where both words in that phrase carry equal weight: The effects seem magical, and the show has a structure that never wears us out or leaves us fidgeting.
—
The Charlotte Observer
The Atlantic Yards scam was bankrolled with hundreds of millions in public funding—though the chicanery here is so involved that no one can even say for sure what the final public subsidy figures will be. . . . But in a brilliant piece of political legerdemain, no elected official was forced to actually vote for the project.
—
Harper’s Magazine
It was a measure of the governor’s savvy, and his budget’s sanity, that “altruistic” was the worst epithet the state Senate Republican leader could summon to criticize it. An example of Mr. Northam’s political legerdemain is his tax proposal, which avoided the minefields of income or sales tax increases.
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The Washington Post
The intention was to mask the weakness of ailing financial institutions, with the hope that it would become somebody else's problem. . . . Other efforts at accounting legerdemain followed, notably the Farm Credit Act Amendments of 1986, which allow the troubled Farm Credit System banks to spread loan losses and the premiums paid to refinance high-interest debt over 20-year periods.
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The New York Times
Legerdemain is accomplished through “lightness of the hand,” a way of tricking people (usually through “sleight” of hand). This word came from Latin to English via the French legerdemain: “lightness of hand.” The French adjective leger (“light, not heavy”) came straight from the Latin levis, “light, of little weight.”
Word Theater
Penn and Teller An example of the art of legerdemain.
The panel shows a small video clip of either the word in actual use or a scene that represents the meaning of a word. This not only breaks up the monotony of studying words but also provides another avenue to strengthen word meaning. Enjoy!
