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If you describe something as ambiguous, you mean that it is unclear or confusing because it can be understood in multiple ways.
If someone beguiles you, you are charmed by and attracted to them, which may make it easy for them to trick or deceive you as well.
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.
If you employ chicanery, you are devising and carrying out clever plans and trickery to cheat and deceive people.
A circuitous route, journey, or piece of writing is long and complicated rather than simple and direct.
Circumlocution is a way of saying or writing something that uses too many words, especially in order to avoid stating the true meaning clearly.
Something that is clandestine is hidden or kept a secret, often because it is illegal.
If one person connives with another, they secretly plan to achieve something of mutual benefit, usually a thing that is illegal or immoral.
Covert activities or situations are secret and hidden.
Something that is delusive deceives you by giving a false belief about yourself or the situation you are in.
A demagogue is someone, usually a political leader, who tries to influence people by making emotional speeches rather than using reasonable arguments.
Someone who is disingenuous is not straightforward or is dishonest in what they say or do.
When you dupe another person, you trick them into believing something that is not true.
If you feign something, such as a sickness or an attitude, you pretend and try to convince people that you have it—even though you don’t.
If someone behaves in a furtive way, they do things sneakily and secretly in order to avoid being noticed.
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.
Legerdemain is the skillful use of one’s hands or the employment of another form of cleverness for the purpose of deceiving someone.
Someone who is perfidious is not loyal and cannot be trusted.
A poseur pretends to have a certain quality or social position, usually because they want to influence others in some way.
Probity is very moral and honest behavior.
Propriety is behaving in a socially acceptable and appropriate way.
A quack is someone who pretends to be qualified to do something—but in actuality is not so at all.
A rapscallion is a young rascal, naughty child, or an older person who is dishonest and a scoundrel.
A scrupulous person takes great care to do everything in an extremely honest, conscientious, and fair manner.
Something that is unadorned is not made more attractive with ornament or decoration.
Someone who is unassuming is not boastful or arrogant; rather, they are modest or humble.
An unctuous person acts in an overly deceptive manner that is obviously insincere because they want to convince you of something.
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
mountebank
MOUN-tuh-bangk
Context
“I knew that he was a mountebank or lying fake, for he was too sly to be real!” my grandmother snapped after Geoffrey had left me at the marriage altar. I was too stunned to speak, but my maid of honor rose to my defense, “How could Gwen know that Geoffrey was a cheat or mountebank? He seemed so loving!” I stood sadly, abandoned among the flowers and cake, but I guess that it was better than being married to a dishonest, tricky mountebank who was only trying to steal my money.
Mountain Bank That mountebank was trying to sell me some real estate on top of that very tall mountain; the mountebank said that if I put a bank on top of that remote mountain then everyone would come to it because it would be the only one in the immediate area!
Examples
While Merrill’s lawsuit portrays Esmerian as a mountebank who was running a shell game, Esmerian accuses the bankers of knowingly inflating the value of the collateral to win approval from the bank’s internal credit committee.
—
CNN
They are the delightful mountebanks of baseball, and you must have intellectual admiration for their larcenous capers.
—
Sports Illustrated
Loosed on the world in 1839, John Davison Rockefeller Sr. was the son of William Avery "Big Bill" Rockefeller, a slick-as-elixir mountebank . . . Big Bill often pretended to be deaf and dumb when hawking his snake oils and herbal remedies.
—
The Washington Post
A mountebank was a clever trickster who would “mount a bench” so that a crowd would gather round, at which point he would hawk nostrums or snake oil (fake medicines), employing a “toady” who would eat a toad (once considered poisonous), drink the supposed wonder drug to ward off the poison, and declare himself cured; great sales of the mountebank’s miraculous potion would then follow.
