(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.
Sleight
Definition:
(n.) Cunning; craft; artful practice.
(n.) An artful trick; sly artifice; a feat so dexterous that the manner of performance escapes observation.
(n.) Dexterous practice; dexterity; skill.
Example Sentences:
(1) Although it's presented as a boys' story, rooted in historical reality, it also demonstrates Stevenson's artistic sleight-of-hand.
(2) No, not Gordon Brown, although there were times when today's sleights of hand and burying of bad news had strong echoes of the clunking fist at its worst.
(3) Bewley lifts the lid on a world of sleight of hand, massage and plain lying by omission in the world of fertility statistics.
(4) This sort of sleight of hand is what we lawyers call " sharp practice ".
(5) Infantile delivery also frequently serves to take the curse off self-publicity; sleight of hand for those who find "my programme is on BBC2 tonight" too presumptuous and exposing, and prefer to cower behind the low-status imbecility of "I done rote a fingy for da tellybox!"
(6) A fluorescent analog of phosphatidylethanolamine [palmitoyl-C6-NBD)-PE), which also exhibits transmembrane movement at the plasma membrane at 7 degrees C (Sleight, R. G., and Pagano, R. E. (1985) J. Biol.
(7) At times it has obfuscated its message on the bailout but Syriza's most impressive sleight of hand has been its attempt to appeal to incompatible constituencies.
(8) The tone is set once the charlady answers the telephone with the words: “Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring.” The critics first comment on the action from the stalls and then, by a Pirandellian sleight of hand, become a part of it.
(9) He predicted: "There is a real, real danger that the Liberal Democrats could implode – their role has been a sleight of hand."
(10) The Institute for Fiscal Studies played a blinder, as usual, pointing out the Treasury's sleights of hand and misrepresentations.
(11) Instead, as we have reported, HMRC is using sleight of hand to release information about VAT to credit reference agencies who have been disguised as contractors to avoid confidentiality law.
(12) In England, unless championed by Labour, they can just as easily be harnessed by Ukip – or used to justify a Tory constitutional sleight of hand that could derail a Labour government and leave Liverpool and Newcastle at the mercy of a Farageist southern suburbia.
(13) Had the Elysée's salles des fêtes been packed to the ornate rafters and chandeliers with French media, the sleight of hand might have worked.
(14) Green campaigners believe the Lib Dems have been persuaded into allowing higher energy bills to flow into increased profits for nuclear companies by a sleight of hand that lets ministers disguise nuclear subsidies as support for "low-carbon power".
(15) Osborne's budget was a lesson in sleight of hand Read more The moment was ripe for someone – perhaps a child, as in the fable – to stand up and point out that the emperors of the Treasury and the OBR have no clothes; that all these predictions, while not exactly worthless, can’t be relied on to last five weeks let alone five years.
(16) Another tweeted that BGT’s producers should have informed viewers about the sleight of hand before the public decided who to vote for in the final.
(17) Thailand’s friends abroad should not be fooled by this obvious sleight of hand … that effectively provides unlimited and unaccountable powers.” In particular, unlawful detentions of civilian opponents looked set to increase, he suggested .
(18) Scrutiny of the documents suggests it is based on three key assumptions – and one sleight of hand.
(19) Chinese hamster ovary cells maintained in culture medium supplemented with complete serum can grow at nearly normal rates in the presence of phospholipase C for many generations, even though the treatment enhances turnover of cellular phosphatidylcholine (R. Sleight and C. Kent (1983) J. Biol.
(20) "Britain's young people who do not have the skills they need for work should be in training, not on benefits," said Miliband, in a neat bit of sleight of hand that lays the lack of employment in this age group firmly at their own door.