Word: legerdemain
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...apparently worth more, so Harvard decided to value them at an increased figure on its books. Now changing business conditions, and perhaps the accounting policies of a new Treasurer, have showed it advisable to return to the more conservative valuations of the pre-1930 period. In all this accounting legerdemain, there has been no change in real value which would not have taken place regardless of the mark-up in book value...
...power-the citizen's income of today-is not sufficient to drive the economic system at higher speed." Thus the program itself was founded on the old pump-priming theory with five billions in cash and credit to do the trick. By various bits of legal and financial legerdemain the net cost to the taxpayer was described hopefully as a mere billion and a half. According to the President this would provide him with the "three rounds" of ammunition needed to down Depression...
...chief interests are chronic indigestion and listening to the Whoops Family on the radio. But Lucy realizes that the only way to keep Irene from booming young Senator Keane (Victor Jory) into a Presidential threat is to inaugurate a rival boom for Irene's husband. Last-minute legerdemain with a previous marriage of Irene's cuts short the boomeranging boom by intimating that, as husband of a woman whose foreign divorce has no legal standing, Justice Hibbard has been living in sin for ten years...
Recalling that Dictator Stalin officially "claimed a quantitative fulfillment of 93.7%" for the First Five-Year Plan, Mr. Lyons analyzes in a chapter the figures on which this is based, discusses many a "cute piece of arithmetical legerdemain" used by Kremlin economists. "That the Plan has been accepted even by hostile capitalist economists as on the whole 'successful' shows the gullibility and naivete of those who deal in cold figures instead of living realities...
...dubbed Bishop Moore "Biscuit" or "Wangi Bischoff" (Yankee bishop). For the trombone they could think of no descriptive word. A practiced sleight-of-hand artist who claims he once could do with one hand a flag trick which Magician Howard Thurston needed two to perform, Song Man Rodeheaver performed legerdemain for the Africans, taking care not to let them think that magic had anything to do with...