(n.) Mean or unfair artifice to perplex a cause and obscure the truth; stratagem; sharp practice; sophistry.
Example Sentences:
(1) Volkswagen’s chicanery was discovered by good, old-fashioned analogue detective work.
(2) Osborne appeared on TV today, dressed in his now customary fluorescent building-site jacket, as if to suggest that even if it took financial chicanery and robbing the poor, Britain would soon be working again.
(3) 5.26pm BST 22 min: Colombia try to get away with some corner-based chicanery, but Howard Webb isn't having any of it.
(4) Juliette Jowit Transport While the headline cut sounds extreme, there is some chicanery here.
(5) Such chicanery, it was suggested, might include Democrats putting their support behind one of the Republican candidates rather than automatically giving a losing vote to the current minority leader, Nancy Pelosi.
(6) It is pushing the campaign off the front of the news locally.” The election has been a long, brutal process and people are much more interested in the World Series John Grabowski, Case Western Reserve University Grabowski cautioned against notions of baseball as morally pure escapism, noting the sport’s own history of “chicanery and trickery”, but added: “Nonetheless it’s linked to what America is supposed to be about – the field of dreams.
(7) Peres was an intriguingly contradictory figure: a romantic in a cynical age, an Israeli icon with a Polish accent and francophone sensibility, who carried about him the taint (deserved or otherwise) of political chicanery.
(8) As former Wall Street analyst Yves Smith wrote in her book ECONned: "What went on at Lehman and AIG, as well as the chicanery in the CDO [collateralized debt obligation] business, by any sensible standard is criminal."
(9) A World Cup in 2018 might have redressed the imbalance between Premier League power and the international game.Instead Fifa's talent for political chicanery has caused England to appear naive.
(10) However, it specifically excluded Scotland (and Northern Ireland), and not through Westminster chicanery, but because – as Roger Davidson and Gayle Davis argued in their 2014 book The Sexual State: Sexuality and Scottish Governance, 1950-80 – Scottish political and public opinion demanded it.
(11) "I suspect this is some chicanery from the right to misconstrue his proposals, because there is no anti-City crusade in what he is proposing.
(12) In Direct Line's latest he's convinced there must be a catch to salesman Chris Addison's straightforward pitch, and so congratulates him for non-existent chicanery.
(13) Many party supporters on both sides are, observers fear, already locked into attitudes subversive of democracy, notably the conviction that their side must and will win, and that, if it does not, it will only be because rigging, violence, or other chicanery have deprived them of the victory an honest vote would have brought.
(14) Labour MP Paul Flynn, who is deeply critical of the use of the indemnity, attacked the way it had been presented to parliament for using "chicanery, subterfuge and secrecy".
(15) Using cameras with night-vision equipment hidden inside fake Japanese rocks, filmmaker Louie Psihoyos brilliantly captures evidence of the fishermens' dirty secret and with it the chicanery of those who profit from it.
(16) They experienced adolescence, developed powerful mother-and-child bonds, and used political chicanery to get what they wanted.
(17) That were it not for Russian chicanery, Hillary Clinton would have won the popular vote by five million and not almost three million?
(18) Note: If it turns out the Red Sox were doctoring the gloves of the Cardinals fielders, then St Louis has a better argument that last night's embarrassment was somehow the fault of Boston chicanery.
(19) Cameron's chicanery probably played some role in climate change's fall from grace.
(20) If you are one of those people – like me – who has long thought that banking with the Co-op amounted to a small stand against the chicanery and stupidity of Finance Capital, you are likely to be feeling ever-so-slightly dazed.
Quibbling
Definition:
(p. pr. & vb. n.) of Quibble
Example Sentences:
(1) And please don’t quibble about whether you have any direct lineage to the architects of racism.
(2) Quibbling over whether fashion is more or less important than art is just as pointless as questioning whether or not it is art.
(3) And with four years as her nation’s chief diplomat on the world stage under her belt, Mrs Clinton’s personal gravitas is even harder to quibble with than it might have been in 2008.
(4) Dammers learned that Mandela had just one quibble with the Special AKA song.
(5) Other quibbles: some iPhone apps don't scale so brilliantly to such a large screen.
(6) To quibble further, one might say, is to simply argue about hinges.
(7) I find myself wondering how far I should go to say that FGM is the slicing off on a conscious young girl with no anaesthetic of her clitoris and labia... “This is a quibble about a couple of stitches and it is a complete distraction.” Mr Justice Sweeney, in summing up to the jury on Wednesday, said everyone accepted Dharmasena had saved the life of the woman’s baby in an emergency delivery on 24 November, 2012.
(8) "While I do quibble with the ethics (or lack of ethics) in posting the Salinger stories, they look to be true transcripts of the originals and match my own copies."
(9) You have explained how you have got caught up in this thing, you've explained your motives: I don't want to quibble about any of that.
(10) Even the US administration, which has repeatedly played up the uncertainties in climate science, has not quibbled with the inclusion of statements such as "human activities since 1750 have very likely (>90%) exerted a net warming influence on climate", and "further emissions of greenhouse gases would be expected to change the climate of the 21st century".
(11) No one could quibble with the report’s section on geopolitics.
(12) Certainly, some will quibble as to how much blame the federal government should receive for this economic downturn.
(13) But there's a bigger problem with the politics of idleness than quibbling over definitions.
(14) The next question is also on inflation but is a bit quibbly: what if inflation is like, you know, really big?
(15) Oh, there are quibbles, so many quibbles, some unfortunately presentational.
(16) Homewatt.co.uk sells LED bulbs and if you don't think they are suitable, use its seven-day no-quibble returns policy to get your money back.
(17) And for the hopefuls lining up outside the passport office: thou shalt not quibble about freedom of speech.
(18) But the deeper flaw was a complacent assumption that Labour was the moral choice, and that people would realise as much if only their misguided quibbles about public spending could be neutralised.
(19) Some quibbled about the methodology, but, taken at face value, the test yielded good and bad results.
(20) It's an understandable stance, since to quibble over the reasons why 15 million died in the first world war may well look unseemly, particularly for a politician hoping that his party replaces Gove's as government next year, but it doesn't have much of the lion about it.