- 1
Legerdemain is clever trickery — the kind that makes you look the other way while the real move happens. It began as a picture of a magician’s hands: light, quick, hard to follow. You still meet it in writing about magic, but a newspaper is just as likely to use it for or money: a bit of legerdemain that hides where the cash went. It is a fancy, slightly old-fashioned word. In speech, people say trick, sleight of hand, or “smoke and mirrors” instead. Do not expect it at the market.
手法、戲法；（文章裡也常指）高明的花招、障眼法
組成From Old French léger de main, literally “light of hand” — a phrase for being skilful at fooling people, especially with the hands. English borrowed the whole phrase as one noun. Later French still has the words, but there they mostly mean “skilful,” without the magic-trick colour.
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
legerdemainnoun/ˌlɛd͡ʒ.ə.dɨˈmeɪn/
- 1
Sleight of hand; "magic" trickery.
- For he in slights and jugling feates did flow, / And of legierdemayne the mysteries did know.
- […] A deliberate man with infinite resources of patience, he was content to progress by easy stages toward the millennium. Some private legerdemain must have reconciled him to the "practical" methods that were employed. […]
- 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.
- Just for a moment, absurdly over-estimating poor Zuleika’s skill, he supposed himself a victim of legerdemain.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。