Duplicitous

In response to the synonym Sly, by Dancing Echoes in the post Line

Some Sly synonyms: cunning, crafty, clever, wily, artful, guileful, tricky, conniving, scheming, devious, designing, deceitful, duplicitous, dishonest, disingenuous, underhand, sneaky, untrustworthy, manipulative, calculating, Machiavellian….

There’s that old chestnut of a curse: “May you live in interesting times.” These times are certainly interesting, but I think the word Duplicitous describes a fair bit of what makes them interesting. And I wouldn’t curse anyone with a life lived in duplicitous times.

The manipulative deceit marking even the most casual-seeming conversation whenever it strays into topics of hyper-partisanship is marring friendships, relationships and family cohesion. It doesn’t take long for this to boil over into anger, even hatred, and the conditions which produce regrettable statements, and the finality of a block or an unfriending.

As much as conniving duplicity has overrun social media an social relations, nowhere is this darkness more prevalent than in politics. Not that politicians have never been thought of as particularly honest or bursting with integrity, but the underhanded quile and cunning manipulation, the sheer audacity of duplicity, stuns me.

These are dark, dark times.

Want to Play?

First, you can play any word offered by any post, or any comment, at any time. No deadlines.

To play the word in this post, pick a synonym from below or any other synonym you can find. Now tell us what you picked in a comment. If you like, add a few words (or a bunch of words) about why you picked it. Or maybe use it to inspire a poem or micro-fiction or… well, anything you like.

Some Duplicitous Synonyms:

cheating, deceitful, dishonest, double-dealing, shady, two-faced, two-timing, crooked, deceptive, guileful, underhanded… more synonyms

EZPZ, right?

Just … play nice. (Check out the conditions of play if you’re not sure what nice means. 😉 )

You can also play by replying to any of the comments other people post. Use a thesaurus to find a synonym for the word in the comment, and reply with that.

Advanced Play

Want to play the advanced game? Use your chosen synonym as inspiration to create a new blog post: words, images, sound, video … just about anything, really.

You can think of this game as a one-word creativity prompt. Rather than give you the one word, I’m giving you a list of synonyms to choose your one word from.

I’ll post new words … frequently. Probably not daily, but often. However, there’s no hourglass counting down the time you have left. Feel free to play any word at any time.

If you create something I think is really cool, I’ll ask if we can repost it here, as a new word for others to play.

Here are the rules.