In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lamb: The Lingo of Illusion and Deception for Smoke and Mirrors Day: March 29

An illusion is either something that isn’t there at all or looks like something it isn’t. If you’re really hungry, and your friend’s face suddenly looks like a hamburger, that’s probably an illusion. Also, you may live in a cartoon. Magicians rely on illusions, but there are illusions everywhere, and we all have them. Reckless people may have the illusion that they can’t get hurt or die; people who overspend may have the illusion that they’ll never have to pay off their credit cards.

Some illusions are meant to entertain us, like a magician cutting a woman in half or a professional wrestler appearing to hit another with a sledgehammer. Spoiler alert: Accidents notwithstanding, all of the above are doing fine. But a scam uses smoke and mirrors for a more criminal purpose: swindling someone out of money. Scams can happen in person, on the internet, or anywhere one person is tricking the other into spending money on nothing.

Scams involve deception, which is similar to deceit and trickery. You could call a lie a deception, but the term covers more than just verbal deceit. Impersonating someone is a deception: so is setting up a phony company to smuggle your illegal money into Wakanda, or whatever fake internet princes are up to these days.

This colorful word—seriously, is there a funner term?—has referred to trickery since the early 1700s. To bamboozle is to confuse, perplex, and baffle. This word boggles your mind so badly you might not even realize your bam got boozled.

Here’s another humorous word with a similar meaning: if you’re been bamboozled, you’re pretty likely to be befuddled. To be befuddled is to be confused. People get befuddled all the time: the news, math problems, and James Joyce novels are all potentially befuddling things and situations.

When you mystify someone, you confuse and perplex them. Magicians mystify in a good way; devious politicians and scammers mystify in a bad way. Many things can be mystifying, such as the origin to a disease, the culprit behind a carefully orchestrated crime, and the question of life in outer space. You can mystify other people, and you can also say “I’m mystified” if you don’t understand something.

This is a fancy word for “sleight of hand.” Magicians, with their card tricks are other gimmicks, are masters of prestidigitation. The term prestidigitator, often refers to a juggler.

People often use prevaricate as a euphemism for lie, a word that ironically has plenty of truth to it and is too blunt for some situations. But sometimes prevarication (the noun form) isn’t straight-up lying: it can mean someone is just avoiding a subject or leading listeners up the garden path (an excellent idiom referring to a type of misdirection). Whether a prevaricator is lying or just evading, they’re definitely hiding something and don’t want to say what’s on their mind.

A gimmick is a trick: magicians are masters of gimmickry.

A confederate is an ally. In the case of magicians, a confederate is also an audience member secretly working with the magician.