Thread: Another set of words

What do you think of

falsification, counterfeit, hoax, fake, forgery, fraud, sham, imitation, leg-pull (I'm sure there's more)

?

What we have in Russian:
Фальсификация, подделка, подлог, имитация, мистификация, обман (but is more general "cheating", so I didn't include English "deception", "swindle", Russian "мошенничество" and other words ).

To tell you the truth, I can feel the difference more or less, the only thing I don't know, why there should be "hoax" when there are "fake" and "forgery" or "practical joke".

An object can be false, counterfeit, (a) fake, a forgery, fraudulent, a hoax, a sham, an imitation, bogus, a copy, an imitation, an imposture, a look-alike, a phoney, a facsimile, an impersonation, a mirror, a parallel, a replica, a reproduction, a spoof, a carbon copy, a clone, a ringer, a substitution, a takeoff etc

And a fraudster can be a cheat, a deceiver, a swindler, a charlatan, a con man etc

A fraudster can deceive, swindle, defraud, trick, con somebody etc

Hoax is quite tricky for some reason. You can play a hoax; deceive or cheat by using a hoax; make a hoax telephone call - Explained here

Originally Posted by Propp

What do you think of

falsification, counterfeit, hoax, fake, forgery, fraud, sham, imitation, leg-pull (I'm sure there's more)

?

I think they're great!

To tell you the truth, I can feel the difference more or less, the only thing I don't know, why there should be "hoax" when there are "fake" and "forgery" or "practical joke"

A hoax has the sense of a trick, but it may be something much more serious than a practical joke (which is, after all, a kind of joke). For example, Hitler's diaries were published in a British newspaper some time ago, but much to the journalists' embarrassment, they were later discovered to be a hoax. We couldn't call this just a practical joke, even more so if a large sum of money has changed hands. This is a scam, but more specifically it's a hoax because the idea of falsification is central to it. Here, the word 'forgery' would be slightly inappropriate IMHO because it was not a copy of a known, pre-existing thing. Fake is similar to forgery.

Oh and leg-pull, I'm almost 100% sure is exclusively British, and is rarely used as a noun, much more commonly in the verb 'to pull someone's leg'.

HTH

Originally Posted by waxwing

Oh and leg-pull, I'm almost 100% sure is exclusively British, and is rarely used as a noun, much more commonly in the verb 'to pull someone's leg'.

Well you are 100% wrong then. We "pull people's legs" all the time over here in america. We also "twist people's arms" and suggest people "break their legs".

He means that "leg-pull"(the noun) is British. And I'd say he's right, because I've never heard this term in the US.

Thanks. I did misunderstand.

But I have heard leg-pull up here in the Midwest... We have a lot of regional sayings that aren't common in the rest of the country though.