Roger M. answered 04/19/25
Chinese speaking ELA and SAT Teacher with +10 years experience
Slight of hand refers to the method by which card magicians are able to perform 'magic.' Without any expert knowledge of magicians and their trade, I can't tell you any more details about this, but basically it means using some specialized technique or trick to achieve a goal that otherwise seems difficult or impossible.
Deception is simply telling lies to try to trick someone. Think of the Decepticons from Transformers, especially the first Transformers movie, where the helicopter and police Decepticons are able to maximize their attack by pretending to be the US military or the police. Otherwise, deception could refer to a kind of military tactic where you trick your opponent into thinking or believing something that is not true. One example of this would be the invasion of Germany by the Allied Forces in WW2. The Americans and British setup an entire fake army of thousands of tanks and vehicles, some made of wood and others inflatable objections, to trick German air reconnaissance into thinking that the invasion would happen at some place other than Normandy.
Malevolence is referring to the evil or cruel intention of a person. It is related to the latin root, mal, which means bad, as in malpractice (the wrong diagnosis or treatment by a doctor).
Finally, bad faith refers to someone doing or saying something with bad intentions. To understand this better, let's discuss good faith. To do something in good faith is to try your best to fulfill a requirement (such as with contracts) or to argue a point with another person, with the intention of exploring a topic and possibly being persuaded by the other person. If you fulfill a requirement in bad faith, it means you tried to do something deceptive to fulfill the requirement while knowing that what you were doing was not going to fulfill the requirement, while if you argue with someone in bad faith, you might argue a point with someone just to annoy or upset them, with no real intention of discussion or persuasion.
Anita W.
04/20/25