Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French leger de main light of hand
Date: 15th century
1 : SLEIGHT OF HAND
2 : a display of skill or adroitness
With startling legerdemain she presses the reader toward the truth, as Costello has suggested,
and just for a moment we glimpse the genuine, in this case the fact that
Marianne Moore is playing with the word "imagine" and we see an entirely
opposite meaning in the passage.
au courant
Function: adjective
Etymology: French, literally, in the current
Date: 1762
1 a : fully informed : UP-TO-DATE
2 : fully familiar : CONVERSANT
As different as she was from the fashionably au courant, she was encouraged by her friends' romantic but common insistence on the right to be oneself, while at the same time she was given to distrusting the self.
gallimaufry
Inflected Form(s): plural -fries
Etymology: Middle French galimafree stew
Date: circa 1556
: HODGEPODGE
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