"Slights of hand" (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mark Mandel]

Nice work!

m a m

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC
<Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:

> The Conjuring Arts Research Center (http://www.conjuringarts.org/ ) maintains an online full-text searchable database of magic and related periodicals, books, manuscripts, etc called "AskAlexander" (after the mentalist "Alexander, The Man Who Knows" (Claude Alexander Conlin, http://geniimagazine.com/wiki/index.php/Alexander )).
>
> It is possible to get a sense of the usage of the terms "sleight" and "slight" within the conjuring community from this database.
>
> Found 28361 pages in 2359 documents matching "SLEIGHT OF HAND"
> Found 86 pages in 68 documents matching "SLEIGHTS OF HAND"
> Found 508 pages in 281 documents matching "SLIGHT OF HAND"
> Found 4 pages in 3 documents matching "SLIGHTS OF HAND" [all 4 are 1801 or earlier]
>
> Clearly, "Sleight of hand" is the common, accepted usage. Â Other variants are typos, archaic, affectations, and/or non-standard.
>
> If desired, I can probably get a sense of U.S./U.K. usage (by searching within periodicals from America or Britain).

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