Word: ploy
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...this conflict, of course, the doctor always has the advantage of his specialized knowledge. "An intensely annoying ploy [gambit] often used by doctors," writes Potter, "is to treat Patient not only as if he knew nothing about medicine, but as if he were as ignorant of all anatomical knowledge as a child of four. Doctor will start, for instance, speaking very slowly, with 'you see, the heart is a sort of pump,' and will then imitate the action of a pump, unrecognizably, with his hands. Or he will refer to the blood corpuscles as 'the white fellows...
...secondary ploy is the faulty-mechanism technique. Here the Skiman crawls to the side of the trail after a spill, feverishly snapping one binding and muttering Swedish cusswords. The bad binding can excuse several spills if worked right...
Third, the Chinese ploy or the system of sympathy through distance. The crafty student indeed will start his examination question with a couble of sentences which though in English are in an obviously foreign word order. It is wise to use a language which vaguely corresponds with the surname of the writer. At the sight of this peculiarly phrased sentence, the following train of thought inevitably goes through the grader's mind: "Gee this guy is obviously a foreigner; must have come all the way from Bulgaria just to go to Harvard. Anybody who would travel that...
Fourth, we have the Radcliffe ploy. Many people consider that Radcliffe girls are long on facts and short on thinking. Consequently, Radcliffe exams are alleged to contain great globs of partially organized facts, and the ultimate result is that the weight of the facts, whether they are understood or not, gets a passing grade. To take advantage of this, the man who knows little or nothing and therefore has lots of spare time during the exam, embroiders his margins with a host of irrelegant facts. There then exists the outside chance that the grader will mark it like a Radcliffe...
Fifth and most refined we have the room-mate expert or phony reference ploy. Almost everybody sooner or later comes to a point in an examination where he ought to cite a reference. Of course, if he comes upon the rare occasion where he knows the name of a book, then all is fine. He just states the reference thusly "As Professor Banana says on page 207 of his work, 'The Dynamics of Idiocy.'" It really doesn't make any difference whether the page number is right--the grader certainly won't look it up. As a matter of fact...