legerdemain

WOTD – 26 March 2006

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

(UK) IPA^(key): /ˌlɛd͡ʒ.ə.dɨˈmeɪn/
(US) IPA^(key): /ˈlɛd͡ʒ.əɹ.dəˌmeɪn/
Audio (US): (file)

Rhymes: -eɪn
Hyphenation: leg‧er‧de‧main

Noun

legerdemain (usually uncountable, plural legerdemains)

Sleight of hand; "magic" trickery.
Synonyms: prestidigitation, sleight of hand
- 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:
  […] 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. […]
- 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.
(by extension) 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.
- 2023 March 17, David Wallace-Wells, “America Has Decided It Went Overboard on Covid-19”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:
  Most of the time, no one really seems to notice that presentist legerdemain, perhaps because so few of us actually remember the experience of 2020 all that clearly and are clinging to hastily imposed narratives instead.

Derived terms

legerdemainist

Translations

sleight of hand

Finnish: silmänkääntötemppu (fi)
Hungarian: szemfényvesztés (hu)
Latin: praestīgia f
Polish: kuglarstwo (pl) n
Russian: ло́вкость рук (lóvkostʹ ruk)
Spanish: escamoteo (es) m, prestidigitación (es) f
Swedish: taskspeleri n
Turkish: el çabukluğu (tr)

Anagrams

greenmailed

English