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Chicane   Listen
noun
Chicane  n.  
1.
The use of artful subterfuge, designed to draw away attention from the merits of a case or question; specifically applied to legal proceedings; trickery; chicanery; caviling; sophistry. "To shuffle from them by chicane." "To cut short this chicane, I propound it fairly to your own conscience."
2.
(Card playing) In bridge, the holding of a hand without trumps, or the hand itself. It counts as simple honors.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Chicane" Quotes from Famous Books



... lost his temper, too. He was a doughty soldier, but when it came to the intellectuals—when it came to delicate chicane, and scheming, and trickery—he couldn't see any further through a millstone than another. So he burst out in his frank warrior fashion, and swore that the King of England was being treacherously used, and that Joan of Arc was going to be allowed to cheat the stake. But they whispered ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain

... spirit nearly a hundred years before. It had died with Francis I. The wars of the League were wars of Chicane; Artifice in arms, Subtlety in steel coats. The profligacy of the courts of Louis Quatorze, and his successors, dissolved at once the morals and the mind of France. That great country exhibited, to the eye of Europe, the aspect of the most extravagant license, and the most rapid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various

... reasonable guess can be made beforehand. These are, all and several, reactionary agencies, factors of retardation, making for continuation of the current international situation of animosity, distrust, chicane, trade rivalry, competitive armament, and eventual ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... managed the affair fairly well, he thought. Indeed, he had a talent for chicane, and none knew it better than himself. It would have been dangerous if the servants had been left in the castle. They might have suffered from insomnia, and heard William Smith, and interfered with the operations of William Smith. On the other hand, Sir Jee had no intention whatever of leaving ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... and energetic children of Europe. Whatever the Bengalee does, he does languidly. His favorite pursuits are sedentary. He shrinks from bodily exertion, and, though voluble in dispute and able in the war of chicane, he seldom engages in a personal conflict, and scarcely ever enlists as a soldier. There never, perhaps, existed a people so thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot

... Germany's policy in the last forty years may be derived from the eminently practical and direct mind of Bismarck. From reading of history he learned that chicane and force had been utilized as the roads to power, of which fact he found ample demonstration in the histories of England and Russia. He proved himself a true adept by using chicane and force to achieve German unity, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... browbeating and appeal to religious prejudice and to fear of losing jobs—by all sorts of chicane," said Davy, "about seven of these eight thousand votes are kept divided between the Republican or Kelly party and the Democratic or House party. The other ten or twelve hundred belong to Victor Dorn's League. Now, the seven thousand workingmen voters who follow Kelly and House like ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips

... them water and provisions, ready for setting out as soon as he should come up with the camels. Now this Badawi was a base born churl, a highway thief and a traitor to the friend he held most fief, a rogue in grain, past master of plots and chicane. He had no daughter and no son and was only passing through the town when, by the decree of the Decreer, he fell in with this unhappy one. And he ceased not to hold her in converse on the highway till they came without the city of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... you quote, may draw on me the host of judges and divines. They may cavil, but cannot refute it. Those who read Prisot's opinion with a candid view to understand, and not to chicane it, cannot mistake its meaning. The reports in the Year-books were taken very short. The opinions of the judges were written down sententiously, as notes or memoranda, and not with all the developement which they probably used in delivering them. Prisot's ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... England soon after Edward had settled the Scottish succession. Neither Edward nor Philip the Fair sought a conflict. Edward was satisfied with his diplomatic successes, and Philip's designs upon Gascony were better pursued by chicane than by warfare. But questions arose of a different kind from the disputes as to feudal right, which had been hitherto the principal matters in ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... of Age, to Orleans to study the Common Law; which he did with so great Applause, that at Three Years End he merited the Degree of Doctor. His Father designing to surrender to him his Place of Counsellor of Parliament, sent for him home: But the young Gentleman was soon tired with the Chicane of the Bar, and plung'd himself deep in the Studies of [Footnote: Les belles Lettres.] Humanity and the Roman Laws; for which he had a wonderful Inclination. He happen'd to be a frequent Spectator of the Protestants Sufferings, ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman

... before such a tribunal, too, should be marked by ardor rather than by prudence. He should chafe under delay, clamor for investigation, and invite scrutiny, and put away from him all advisers whose experience is likely to incline them to chicane or make them satisfied with a technical victory. Such men are always dangerous in delicate cases. He should not wait for his accuser to get in all his case if the substantial part of it is already before the court, because his answer ought not, as in ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin

... keystone of the arch that sustained the structure of chicane. To dislodge him was the direct way to collapse it. I was about to set to work when Langdon, feeling that he ought to have a large supply of cash in the troublous times I was creating, increased the capital stock of his already enormously overcapitalized ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips

... establishes the heroine. There are certainly feminine persons, sometimes not disagreeable, who play conspicuous and by no means mute or unpractical parts in both Greek and Latin versions of the Ass-Legend; but one can hardly call them heroines. There need be no chicane about the application of that title to Chloe or to Chariclea, to Leucippe or to her very remarkable rival, to Anthia or to Hysmine. Without the heroine you can hardly have romance: the novel without her (though her ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... foam'd rebellious Logic, gagg'd and bound, There, stripp'd, fair Rhetoric languish'd on the ground; His blunted arms by Sophistry are borne, And shameless Billingsgate her robes adorn. Morality, by her false guardians drawn. Chicane in furs, and Casuistry in lawn, Gasps, as they straiten at each end the cord, And dies, when Dulness gives her page the word. 30 Mad Mathesis[380] alone was unconfined, Too mad for mere material chains to bind, Now to pure space[381] lifts her ecstatic stare, Now running round the circle, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... visitors, if they be men enervated by the climate or by pleasure, indifferent to the fate of nations, strangers to political chicane, they will, in the natural order of events, become converted to the ideas of the Roman aristocracy, between a quadrille and a ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About

... fetch it, he needs to be very good, and very wise, not to abuse his position. But the white man, as yet, is a half-tamed pirate, and avails himself as much as ever of the maxim, "Might makes right." All that civilization does for the generality is to cover up this with a veil of subtle evasions and chicane, and here and there to rouse the individual mind to ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... Hugo of Les Chatiments we scorn and vituperate its charlatan head or pity him profoundly as we see him ill and helpless in Zola's Debacle, most of us, if we are candid, will confess that the Second Empire, especially the Paris of Morny and Hausmann, of cynicism and splendour, of frivolity and chicane, of servile obsequiousness and haughty pretension, the France and the Paris that drew to themselves the eyes of all Europe and particularly the eyes of the watchful Bismarck, have for us a fascination almost as great as they had for the gay and audacious men and women ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... people; it incorporates in it a clause establishing slavery in perpetuity; it connects with it a Schedule perpetuating the existing slavery, whatever it may be, against all future remedy which has not the sanction of the slave-master; and then, by a miserable chicane, it submits the Constitution to a vote of the people, but it submits it under such terms, that the people, if they vote at all, must vote for it, whether they like it or not, while the only part in which they can exercise any choice ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... fussent communes dans cette colonie, du moins on fut assez long tems sans rien fermee sous la clef, et il etoit inoui qu'on s'en abusat. Il est bien etrange et bien humiliant pour l'homme que les precautions qu'un prince sage prit pour eviter la chicane et faire regner la justice, aient presque ete l'epoque de la naissance de l'une, et de l'affoiblissement de l'autre.... La justice est rendue selon les ordonnances du royaume et la coutume de Paris. Au mois de Juin, 1679, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton

... to a prison, and adjudging my family to beggary and famine. I am innocent, gentlemen, of the darkness and uncertainty of your science. I never darkened it with absurd and contradictory notions, nor confounded it with chicane and sophistry. You have excluded me from any share in the conduct of my own cause; the science was too deep for me; I acknowledged it; but it was too deep even for yourselves: you have made the way so intricate, that you are yourselves lost in it; you err, and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... sufficiently queer for a student. While his colleagues employed themselves by turns with politics, love, the theatre, and a little in study, Ramses had withdrawn entirely into the study of all conceivable suits and claims, into the chicane subtleties of property, hereditary, land and other business law-suits, into the memorizing and logical analysis of quashed decisions. Perfectly of his own will, without in the least needing the money, he served for a year as a clerk at a notary's for another ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin



Words linked to "Chicane" :   shell, jugglery, shaft, guile, bridge hand, object, jockey, deception, beat, trickery, dissimulation, vanquish, movable barrier, dupery, humbug, deceit, fraudulence, screw



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