30 April 2014

artifice

[ahr-tuh-fis]

noun

1. a clever trick or stratagem; a cunning, crafty device or expedient; wile. The Trojan Horse was an artifice the Greeks used to get inside the city of Troy.
2. trickery; guile; craftiness.
3. cunning; ingenuity; inventiveness: a drawing-room comedy crafted with artifice and elegance.
4. a skillful or artful contrivance or expedient.

Origin:
1525–35; < Anglo-French < Latin artificium craftsmanship, art, craftiness, equivalent to arti-, combining form of ars art1 + -fic-, combining form of facere to do1 , make + -ium + -ium

Synonyms
1. subterfuge. See trick. 2. deception, deceit, art, duplicity. See cunning.

Anagram

fat icier
if it care
if I react

Today’s aphorism

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

– Frank Zappa

On this day

30 April – International Jazz Day.

30 April 1945 – German Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, commit suicide in a bunker in Germany. Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany since 2 August 1934. He was born in Austria on 20 April 1889.