thimblerig
Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- noun A game of skill which requires the bettor to guess under which of three small cups (or thimbles) a pea-sized object has been placed after the party operating the game rapidly rearranges them, providing opportunity for sleight-of-hand trickery; a shell game.
- noun One operating such a game.
- verb To cheat in the thimblerig game.
- verb To cheat by trickery.
Examples
-
This old gambling game (earlier known as thimblerig), in which the operator openly places a pea under one of three walnut shells, then rapidly shifts the shells around and challenges a sucker to bet on the location of the pea, has given its name to any kind of chicanery or subterfuge.
-
But the only object of this argument is to show how mal-adroitly Mr. Landor plays at thimblerig.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 330, April 1843
-
In these circumstances, and smarting as I was under the recollection of recent defeat, it is not strange that I thought I detected the old political ruse of dressing the wolf in sheep's clothing, of using handsome pledges as a mask to deceive the gullible, and that I assumed that this scholarly amateur in politics was being used for their own purposes by masters and veterans in the old game of thimblerig.
-
And yet every day one saw more distinctly that they were the pea in the thimblerig of life, the hub of a universe which, to the approbation of the majority they represented, they were fast making uninhabitable.
-
There are comic and _genre_ pictures of parties, where the gentlemen and ladies are sometimes represented as being the worse for wine; of dances where ballet-girls in short dresses perform very modern-looking pirouettes; of exercises in wrestling, games of ball, games of chance like chess or checkers, of throwing knives at a mark, of the modern thimblerig, wooden dolls for children, curiously carved wooden boxes, dice, and toy-balls.
Note
The word 'thimblerig' comes from 'thimble' plus 'rig' (trick).
