artifice
IPA: ˈɑrtʌfɪs
noun
- A crafty but underhanded deception.
- A trick played out as an ingenious, but artful, ruse.
- A strategic maneuver that uses some clever means to avoid detection or capture.
- A tactical move to gain advantage.
- (archaic) Something made with technical skill; a contrivance.
verb
- To construct by means of skill or specialised art
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Examples of "artifice" in Sentences
- They assumed that we must live by artifice, and they entitled artifice 'Science.'"
- This declaration of artifice is to the point because it both invests in the power of representation and recognizes its limitations.
- Last Sunday on This Week With David Brinkley, Cokie Roberts dismissed Clinton's conduct as an "artifice" -- an exercise in campaign strategy.
- But thinking through the poem's artifice is only one way into it, and on the poem's own terms it is not necessarily a better path than the one pointed to by the rhetorical question of the
- Spark, I think, would reply that the novelist can do nothing else, because she simply has this power over her characters; not to admit it, to hide that control in fathoms of agreeable artifice, is to act in bad faith.
- Maybe so, but I think there's also a sense in which readers of fantastic fiction become attuned to these irrationalities, such that when realist writers do introduce them as purportedly naturalistic events, the artifice is obvious.
- We think of the fecundity in artifice with which those of better brain,. no matter how they were handicapped by law, would still outwit those of poorer brain, showing an intensified bitterness born of the class struggle in whose ruthlessness they had been bidden to believe.
- This, my Lord, you are permitted to do; they have no means of resistance; but think not to impose on me by a sophistical assertion of right, or to gloss the villainy of your conduct with the colours of justice; the artifice is beneath the desperate force of your character, and is not sufficiently specious to deceive the discernment of virtue.
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