Word of the Day!

jiggery-pokery [ jig-uh-ree-poh-kuh-ree]

noun:
(Cheifly British)
1 trickery, hocus-pocus; fraud; humbug
2 sly, underhanded action
3 manipulation

Examples:

For all the corrugated iron sheep, dogs, cows, parrots, cockatoos and chooks that populate Michael Scott-Mitchell's witty, fully corrugated set, for all the jiggery-pokery and quackery-knackery, Donizetti's glorious score emerges with clarity and humour. (Michael Shmith, Opera Review: The Elixir of Love, The Sydney Morning Herald, November 2015)

Is Emera really funding all this excess executive compensation out of its own 'unrelated' revenues and/or out of the goodness of its generous corporate heart? Or is this just more corporate obfuscation, jiggery-pokery, and sleight of hand? (Stephen Kimber, Nova Scotia Power rate increase: just more corporate obfuscation, jiggery-pokery and sleight of hand, Halifax Examiner, June 2022)

But I fear that any plan to run a single anti-Brexit candidate in a constituency would be met with a plan to run a single pro-Brexit candidate. Jiggery-pokery would be fought with jiggery-pokery. (Euan McColm, Electoral pacts can't stop no-deal juggernaut, The Scotsman, August 2019)

You don't think any jiggery-pokery of this sort is going to snatch Clayton into the world of shades. Not it! (H G Wells, Twelve Stories and a Dream)

Didn't I go into the room? Wasn't he there with the deceased? Wasn't his revolver found? Hadn't there been some jiggery-pokery with his books in London? (Edgar Wallace, The Man Who Knew)


Origin:

The charm of jiggery-pokery lies partly in its bouncing rhythm, a classic example of what's called a double dactyl, a dactyl being a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables; dactyl is named after the Greek word for finger, whose joints represent the three syllables. Other examples of double dactyls are higgledy-piggledy and idiosyncrasy.

The word appears at the end of the nineteenth century and is first recorded in Wiltshire and Oxfordshire dialect. The English Dialect Dictionary quotes an Oxford example, "I was fair took in with that fellow's jiggery-pokery over that pony." The experts are sure that it actually comes from a Scots phrase of the seventeenth century, joukery-pawkery.

The first bit of it means underhand dealing, from a verb of obscure origin, jouk, that means to dodge or skulk; this might be linked to jink and to the American football term juke, to make a move that's intended to deceive an opponent (the other juke, as in jukebox, has a different origin). The second bit is from pawky, a Scottish and Northern English word that can mean artful, sly, or shrewd, though it often turns up in the sense of a sardonic sense of humour. (World Wide Words)