the.com/substitution
Swapping one thing for another and pretending nothing was lost.
means The act of putting one thing in place of another, whether an item, a person, or a symbol in an equation.
from From Latin substituere, 'to put in place of' — sub- (under, in place of) plus statuere (to set up, establish, related to 'stand'). The sense is literally of positioning something underneath or behind to stand in for what was there, a bit of linguistic understudy work baked into the word since Latin legal and rhetorical usage, long before it entered English in the 1400s–1500s.
- math trick
- Solves equations by renaming the problem, not the problem
- soccer term
- The only legal way to erase a bad decision mid-game
- cooking rule
- Applesauce for oil works, confidence for butter does not
- cipher use
- Oldest encryption trick, cracked by counting letter frequency