Resumo de The Bluffer?s Guide To Bluffing

Motto

Sincerity is everything, if you can fake that, you?re made. ? george burns
Bluffer?s Mantra
When tact & truth are not enough ? the honest man must turn to bluff.
Theater
There are still several good reasons for going to the theater, but they all return to the same thing, namely : so that you can say you have been to the theater.
The acting profession is just one long bluff from start to finish so that anything you say, provided you say it with enough authority, will carry you through.
Business
There are many areas of human activity where the whole structure of social behaviour and working relations is based on the art of bluffing; not applied with any malicious intent, but simply as means of self preservation. Thus it is in the business world, which is entirely founded on bluff.
Business is, by its very nature, the act of kidding someone, whether it be a colleague above or below you in the same business, or someone in another business to whom you want to sell something or buy something from, into a belief that :

a) you know what you are doing and b) are to be trusted.
Anyone in business will know how difficult this is in the face of the fact that

a) it is blatantly obvious that you don?t know what you are doing and
b) you would sell bad eggs to your Grandmother.
It is still essential, if relationships are to be maintained and business is to be done, to make the utmost effort to get away with it and, need we say it, the only way is by building a well balanced edifice of bluff.
Cricket

It is important to remember that cricket was a very special game invented by & for the English. So they couched its terms and rules in a language that they felt no one else would understand; most of it based on early or middle Anglo-Saxon. To take a very simple example : the side that are ?in? take it in turns to get out because they then come back in. The bowler?s turn to throw the ball is known as ?over? even before he has begun.For many years these sort of ruses fooled most foreigners and non-english speaking nations never even tried to play it. Imagine how ridiculous it would sound in French having to say ?qu?est que c?est que ca? instead og the graceful English ?howzat??
But gradually people like the Australians got the hang of it and took it up. For some time the English continued to win against these other nations by not letting them know what was meant by ?silly mid-on? and ?yorker? but the wily colonians eventually found these things out and began to triumph. Today it is considered a matter for national rejoicing if England manage to win a Test Match or two.
While cricket was mainly in the safe hands of English gentlemen (Amateurs & Professionals) it supposedly was a game in which good manners and fair play predominated. Hence the phrase ?not cricket? was applied to anything otherwise. But this and other terms like ?clean bowled? have fallen into disuse as cricket has become an illmannered and even violent gamemore akin to boxing.. The aim of the bowler is now to hit and fell the batsman who is forced to come to the wicket in ever increasing amounts of armour.
Conversational bluffing on the subject of cricket is almost entirely on knowledge assimilated from those thick and turgid tomes edited by Norman Wisden, which give the statistics of every important match played since 1066.One has to be able to say, without hesitation, what record opening partnership was achieved by Grace & Faver in 1857 or how many Tests England won in 1931.
Golf:
A multifaceted and devious subject. Various levels to talk about it :

1. The playing of golf, its dress and quaint rituals
2. Other people playing golf.
3. The psychology of golf : This isnot often discussed at its deepest level. Players may be prepared to analyse their reasons for not playing well; but rarely their reasons for playing it at all. They are fully aware that it is injurious to the health, both physically and mentally. They are fully aware that it has made them selfish, arrogant, spendthrift, stupidly optimistic, etc.

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