the.com/charade
A performance everyone agrees to believe, usually to avoid an awkward truth.
means An obvious pretense that people go along with because the alternative—honesty—is too inconvenient.
from From French charade, a kind of riddle or guessing game acted out in gestures and words (the ancestor of the parlor game Charades). French likely borrowed it from the Occitan/Provençal charrada, meaning 'chat' or 'talk,' tied to charrar, 'to chatter.' The word kept its game-like sense of performance into English, then drifted, by the 19th century, from 'party game' to 'transparent pretense' — because once you've watched people act out a word with exaggerated gestures, it's a short step to spotting the same strained performance in everyday life.
- origin
- from a French word for chatter, not acting
- the game
- originally a spoken riddle, not silent miming
- social use
- politeness itself is often a charade, sustained mutually
- tell
- charades collapse the moment someone stops pretending