Devilry seemingly trumped high-minded politics: the aim, says Mr Housh, was entertainment, "screwing with a person until he can't take it anymore".
While many still cling to foreign devilry as an excuse for Iran's woes, others have long since grown cynical and with good reason.
Budget puritans rebelled last month not for the devilry of it but because they wanted Mr Hastert to explain what on earth his budget strategy was: how does he plan to keep spending down?
Although many still cling to foreign devilry as an excuse for Iran's woes, others have long since grown cynical and with good reason.
It was not good to introduce devilry into the Christmas scene, even if the Christ-child could defeat it with one wave of his tiny hand.
And this lack of verbal devilry over 460 pages finally takes its toll.
Their best hope must be this: that Ledger will be so seducing in his devilry they will quickly forget it is him and that he is gone.
Fortunately for Mellencamp, his songs are steeped in much the same Southern stew of guilt and belief, despair and faith, rural dust and hell-raising devilry that coursed through Robert Johnson and Jerry Lee Lewis and the early Baptist congregations when they raised their voices in these same locations, so the effect is never spurious.
In places where outspoken mischief really flourishes, a Churchill-like taste for devilry endures.
The word is French and means "devilry," "manifestations of the devil," or "of devils".
The Vienna Philharmonic plays all together with a single breath, like a mighty cathedral organ, yet evokes a dark, honeyed eroticism; that's the contradiction, between the repressed and the sensual, that made Vienna famous; and Boulez drew out, from Schoenberg's Second Chamber Symphony, the perfumed Wagnerian paroxysms and the (Johann- Straussian devilry.
