Today's Word "chicanery"
A trick or subterfuge
on
Published in Vocabulary
chicanery \shih-KAY-nuh-ree\ (noun) - 1 : The use of trickery or sophistry to deceive (as in matters of law). 2 : A trick; a subterfuge.
"It was therefore not yet obscured by that deep forest of chicanery and circumlocution which those two lawyers planted in it at the beginning of the sixteenth century." -- Victor Hugo, 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'
Chicanery comes from French chicaner, "to quibble, to use tricks," perhaps from Middle Low German schicken, "to arrange," with the sense "to arrange to one's own advantage."
