artifice
Speech parts
1. artifice - Noun
2. artifice - Verb
Meaning
A handicraft; a trade; art of making.
Workmanship; a skillfully contrived work.
Artful or skillful contrivance.
Crafty device; an artful, ingenious, or elaborate trick. [Now the usual meaning.]
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Examples
Archilochus and Alcaeus were aristocratic Greeks whose poetry had a social and religious function that was immediately intelligible to their audiences but which became a mere artifice or literary motif when transposed to Rome.
Cage received lauds for his performance, with Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune writing "Herzog has found his ideal interpreter, a performer whose truth lies deep in the artifice of performance: ladies and gentlemen, Nicolas Cage, at his finest."
As Lorentz later noted (1921, 1928), he considered the time indicated by clocks resting in the aether as "true" time, while local time was seen by him as a heuristic working hypothesis and a mathematical artifice.
Although there are paw marks of a debutante whose skills still require some honing in this collection—especially in the craft itself—there is no doubt that the poetic quality compensates for the sometimes-overemphasized artifice.
Instead of joy, you got stiff service, the whiff of closely managed artifice and a very big bill.
John Dryden offered a more common assessment in the Essay of Dramatic Poesie, in which his Avatar Neander compares Shakespeare to Homer and Jonson to Virgil : the former represented profound creativity, the latter polished artifice.