Someone who tricks people out of their money. "A professional swindler of respectable appearance and address, who uses the trick of having the victim hand over money or other valuables as a token of ‘confidence’ in the sharper." (OED)
“But Mr. Carlisle was made of sterner stuff. If there is much to be said for a moral standpoint against Confidence Trickery as a profession, there is this to be urged in its favour, looking at it from a purely utilitarian point of view—that it undoubtedly breeds in its initiates a certain enviable coolheadedness and enables them to behave with an easy grace in circumstances where the layman would be nonplussed. Mr. Carlisle, after what he would have been the first to confess a bad two minutes, was his resourceful self once more.”
P. G. Wodehouse, Hot Water (1932).
No comments:
Post a Comment