jiggery-pokery 
idiom

- underhanded manipulation or dealings; trickery.

- deceitful or dishonest behaviour; the dishonest manipulation of something.

- underhand practices or dishonest manipulation for personal profit; also the arcane fiddling needed to make a piece of equipment work as you want.

Merriam-Webster, Collins Dictionary, World Wide Words

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PHRASE ORIGIN

Jiggery-pokery is one of English’s most delightful examples of rhyming reduplication — expressions such as hanky-panky, hocus-pocus, nitty-gritty, and higgledy-piggledy.  

Most scholars trace it to the Scottish phrase joukery-pawkery. Jouk meant to dodge, duck, or evade, and pawk meant a trick or cunning cleverness.

Together they suggested evasive trickery, crafty manoeuvring, and underhand dealing. The phrase appears in Scottish sources as early as the late 17th century before evolving into the softer, more musical jiggery-pokery familiar today.

Curiously, although the phrase sounds playful, its meaning is almost always negative.

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CLEAR OR CLEVER

Complexity isn't a warning sign by itself. Brain surgery is complex; so is tax law. The problem comes when complexity seems designed to stop questions rather than answer them. That's why fraud investigators treat baffling paperwork with healthy suspicion, and why politicians are often accused of hiding behind statistics.

The physicist Richard Feynman had a simple test: if an idea couldn't be explained in plain language, he wanted to know why. The next time someone buries you in jargon, numbers or elaborate explanations, ask for the simple version. If they can't give it, you've either found a genuinely difficult subject—or a little jiggery-pokery.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

artifice, chicanery, connivance, deceit, deception, double-dealing, funny business, hanky-panky, hocus-pocus, JIGGERY-POKERY, legerdemain, manipulation, monkey business, sharp practice, skulduggery, subterfuge, trickery, underhand dealing

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“There’s something charming about so-called ‘reduplicatives’,… phrases like mumbo-jumbo, hocus-pocus, and JIGGERY-POKERY.”

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