Today is...

[IceWizard]

Tuesday 29 March 2016

Smoke and Mirrors Day



Wait a second, what the heck is National Smoke and Mirrors Day?

According to National Whatever Day, today’s “holiday” stems from the phrase “smoke and mirrors,” which is a more creative way of identifying and declaring deception.

It is celebrated annually on March 29, and is also alternately referred to as The Festival of Smoke and Mirrors Day.

In plain language, a University of Massachusetts student may use this phrase when saying something like, “I’m worried the essay questions on the biology midterm might be smoke and mirrors so the professor can trick us by weeding out the non-genius class members.”

Here, the expression smoke and mirrors would be correctly used to portray that an essay question for a biology exam must be implanted to deceive students.

Okay, we get the meaning. But where did the phrase smoke and mirrors originate from in the first place?

“This expression alludes to the performances of stage conjurers who use actual smoke and mirrors to deceive the audience,” according to The Phrase Finder. National Whatever Day further explained this, stating that magicians made “objects appear or disappear by extending or retracting mirrors amid a confusing burst of smoke.”

Over time, this act became symbolic for anything purposely fraudulent that fooled audiences or the public. The phrase was later being used to describe trickery within politics, starting somewhere in the mid 1970s.

According to The Phrase Finder, writer Jimmy Breslin was one of the first journalists to incorporate “smoke and mirrors” into writing as a metaphor for deceit within politics.