How To Use Thimblerig In A Sentence

To play fast and loose now means to behave in a deceitful or irresponsible manner. shell game This old gambling game (earlier known as thimblerig), in which the operator openly places a pea under one of three walnut shells, then rapidly shifts the shells around and challenges a sucker to bet on the location of the pea, has given its name to any kind of chicanery or subterfuge. VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XIII No 2
There was Dr. Bennett, a riverboat gambler who invented thimblerig and could still outwit the best of them at 70.
Find the Lady is, except for the props used, essentially the same as the probably centuries-older shell game or thimblerig.
Telling the Bees," "Hey for the Ferry!" and two in the style of Frith, all thimblerig and crinolines, given them by Swithin. Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works
In these circumstances, and smarting as I was under the recollection of recent defeat, it is not strange that I thought I detected the old political ruse of dressing the wolf in sheep's clothing, of using handsome pledges as a mask to deceive the gullible, and that I assumed that this scholarly amateur in politics was being used for their own purposes by masters and veterans in the old game of thimblerig. Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him

Select your character and find it hidden beneath one of the three containers in the game of thimblerig.
And yet every day one saw more distinctly that they were the pea in the thimblerig of life, the hub of a universe which, to the approbation of the majority they represented, they were fast making uninhabitable. The Best British Short Stories of 1922
But the only object of this argument is to show how mal-adroitly Mr. Landor plays at thimblerig. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 330, April 1843
Your genuine pietist would find a mystical sense in thimblerig. The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
Our artist then can cover up faces, and yet show them quite clearly, as in the thimblerig group; or he can do without faces altogether; or he can, at a pinch, provide a countenance for a gentleman out of any given object — a beautiful Irish physiognomy being moulded upon a keg of whiskey; and a jolly George Cruikshank
Russian carnival on the ice, oxen being sometimes roasted whole, and all kinds of "fakirs," as they are now termed, selling doughnuts, spruce-beer, and gingerbread, or tempting the adventurous with thimblerig; many pedestrians stopping at the old-fashioned inn on Smith's Memoirs