Word: sleight
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...always assumed that John Connally was the greatest living practitioner of fast-on-the-draw, sleight-of-hand Texas politics, and much too smart ever to be caught on the wrong side of the law. That theory was shaken last week when Connally was indicted on five counts of accepting an illegal gratuity, perjury and obstruction of justice for his role in the White House milk scandal. If convicted on all counts, he could face up to 19 years in prison and $50,000 in fines...
...they sighed. Television had consumed their best acts; film had taken the magic out of life. They spoke in the jargon of the trade: there were no tricks, only "effects"; a disappearing object was a "vanish"; a suddenly appearing object was a "production"; a nimble-handed move was a "sleight." The masters of all these effects and sleights had vanished. Houdini, who could get out of a steel coffin, could not escape from his wooden one; Cardini, who commanded the attention of a jammed theater with nothing but a deck of cards and a pack of cigarettes; Thurston, Dunninger, Blackstone...
...Professor Dai Vernon at the Magic Castle. In three months, he had mastered the trade of the tricks. Two producers caught his act in Toronto and built a hit around him. Today, with a combination of optical illusions, paraphernalia and misdirection, Henning holds audiences in the palm of his sleight of hand...
...extracurricular role of calculators emerged as mathematically minded users found that the versatile devices could be used to play sleight-of-button games and spell words. Because on most calculators, the glowing digits of the readout screen, when inverted, look more or less like letters of the alphabet,* the calculator owner can use the machine to compose more than 100 words and endless riddles. For example, to get the calculator to devise words suggestive of the energy crisis: put 42.46407 into the machine, divide by 3 and multiply by 5. Upside down the machine spells ShELL OIL (the floating decimal...
...bloodless face; the wrench of Catholicism. The surrealism here is not extraneous or forced-it arises out of the material. Instead of a shock show of the contorted and bizarre, the film glides with the constant expectation of something more subtly strange, the ever-present possibility that some grazing sleight of hand will tamper with reality just enough to dip the action into a world of dreams. When Tristana climbs the bell-tower, with the deaf boy behind and looking up her skirt, she comes upon the bloodied, severed head of the gentleman, swinging crazily from the church bell...