parlor trick

noun

variants US parlor trick or British parlour trick

plural parlor tricks

: a usually simple trick or demonstration that is used especially to entertain or amuse guests

… this book … includes classic parlor tricks such as piercing a balloon with a needle without popping it, and yanking a tablecloth out from under bottles and plates.

—Dolly Setton

—sometimes used figuratively

Their game is an illusion, a political parlor trick: Hold down funding for key priorities, such as K-12 education, or universities, and then when revenues create a surplus, call it an "overpayment" by taxpayers.

—Mike Owen

Methods of reporting change, and with the fierce competition of the Internet age, many reporters have resorted to ambush journalism or other parlor tricks.

—David Yas

Examples of parlor trick in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Balance, of course, is a journalistic parlor trick. —Jay Caspian Kang, The New Yorker, 5 Apr. 2024

Earmarks are just a legislative parlor trick that allows individual members of Congress to mandate spending on specific projects, which often – but not always – benefit their cronies or some special interest. —Eleanor Dearman, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 15 Feb. 2024

The book thrums with a newfound pessimism; Ariely seems to have lost faith in his old parlor tricks. —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 30 Sep. 2023

These experiments are more than just fancy parlor tricks. —Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 19 Sep. 2023

Fortunately, the value in zero-knowledge proofs extends well beyond parlor tricks and protecting paranoid mathematicians. —Jack Murtagh, Scientific American, 1 July 2023

Unlike those bots, which are in some ways high-tech parlor tricks, CarynAI goes a step further by promising to create a real emotional bond with users, bringing to mind the 2013 movie Her and raising all sorts of ethical questions. —Alexandra Sternlicht, Fortune, 9 May 2023

While so much attention is being paid to ChatGPT parlor tricks and Midjourey 5 versions of Donald Trump, the bigger story is about which company can offer developers the best AI tools—and the new software that developers will build with that AI by their side. —WIRED, 30 Mar. 2023

And the parlor tricks aren't over yet! —Kristen Baldwin, EW.com, 7 Mar. 2023

Word History

First Known Use

1855, in the meaning defined above