legerdemain

Etymology

From Middle English legerdemeyn, lechardemane, from Old French léger de main (literally “light of hand”), a phrase that meant “dexterous, skillful at fooling others (especially through sleights of hand”), which was however treated as a noun when it was borrowed by late Middle English. The Modern French descendant léger de main of the Old French phrase is archaic but still sometimes found in older literature and simply means “skillful” without any connotation of sleight of hand.

noun

1. Sleight of hand; "magic" trickery.
   Chief Justice Roberts does more or less the same thing in dissent: He practices intentions-and-expectations originalism while randomly sprinkling some public-meaning originalism fairy dust over his description of his enterprise, perhaps in the subconscious hope that no one will notice the legerdemain. March 8 2021, Michael C. Dorf, “Old-School Intentions-and-Expectations Originalism in the Nominal Damages Case”, in Dorf on Law
2. A show of skill or deceitful ability.
   Certainly, that they are to this day so rife in Italy and Spain, and so scant in Britain, is a shrewd ground to apprehend Legerdemain, and forgery, in the accounts we get of their later Saints. 1673, Gilbert Burnet, The mystery of iniquity unvailed, London, page 128