legerdemain
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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See also: léger de main
Etymology
From Middle English legerdemeyn, lechardemane, from Old French léger de main (literally “light of hand”), a phrase that meant “dexterous, skillful at fooling others (especially through sleights of hand”), which was however treated as a noun when it was borrowed by late Middle English. The Modern French descendant léger de main of the Old French phrase is archaic but still sometimes found in older literature and simply means “skillful” without any connotation of sleight of hand.
Pronunciation
Noun
legerdemain (usually uncountable, plural legerdemains)
- Sleight of hand; "magic" trickery.
- 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
- For he in slights and jugling feates did flow, / And of legierdemayne the mysteries did know.
- 1959, Margaret Leech, “Champion of Protection”, in In the Days of McKinley, New York: Harper & Brothers, →LCCN, →OCLC, pages 35–36:
- Congress was the school of McKinley's education. It made him a preeminently "practical" politician, always ready to concede and take as much as it was possible to get. "We cannot always do what is best," he once told a gathering of his comrades at Canton, "but we can do what is practical at the time." A deliberate man with infinite resources of patience, he was content to progress by easy stages toward the millennium. Some private legerdemain must have reconciled him to the "practical" methods that were employed. The struggles in the "dusty arena" of Ohio were notorious. Medieval knight or not, McKinley fought shoulder to shoulder with highly irregular partisans. He scrupulously shunned the bribe and the bargain, but his purity must have involved an intricate self-deception, a timely looking away and convenient forgetfulness.
- 2021 March 8, Michael C. Dorf, “Old-School Intentions-and-Expectations Originalism in the Nominal Damages Case”, in Dorf on Law:
- Chief Justice Roberts does more or less the same thing in dissent: He practices intentions-and-expectations originalism while randomly sprinkling some public-meaning originalism fairy dust over his description of his enterprise, perhaps in the subconscious hope that no one will notice the legerdemain.
- A show of skill or deceitful ability.
- 1673, Gilbert Burnet, The mystery of iniquity unvailed, London, page 128:
- Certainly, that they are to this day so rife in Italy and Spain, and so scant in Britain, is a shrewd ground to apprehend Legerdemain, and forgery, in the accounts we get of their later Saints.
Synonyms
Translations
sleight of hand
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Further reading
sleight of hand on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
Anagrams
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