According to a British account, however, Radama himself was credited with warning the queen of the plot, in which his cooperation was merely a ploy to entrap the conspirators.
The "pigeon ploy," for example, in which a pickpocket squirts a substance onto a person's shirt, points it out and tries to wash it off -- lifting a wallet in the process -- continues to dupe countless victims.
Trollope uses the same ploy four years later in "John Caldigate," in which John gets thrown into a linen closet with his cousin Julia and comes out, in Julia's and her mother's minds, engaged.
The tension is never truly released: sex is no more than a ploy in a world in which no one who is weak, or even decent, could possibly survive.
This ploy permitted comparison between species in which weights have different meanings.
Hyman says that Edward appears to be using an old magician's ploy known as "cold reading," in which he makes educated guesses about a person based on the person's responses and visual cues -- everything from posture to clothing to facial expressions.
When Democrats changed the rules for nominations, they used a complicated procedural ploy dubbed the "nuclear option" in which they forced a series of precedent-setting votes on rules that essentially said the filibuster would no longer apply to most executive nominations.
But millions of consumers could still be vulnerable to sophisticated identity-theft ploys -- "spear phishing" -- in which scammers target e-mails to specific people and make it appear as if they came from a company they trust.
