This world is fikel and desayvable,
And fals and unsiker, and unstable.
Richard Rolle de Hampole, Pricke of Conscience, 1088.
The most uncertain and deceivable proof of the people’s good will and cities’ toward kings and princes are the immeasurable and extreme honours they do unto them.—North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 743.
For we folowed not decevable fables, when we openned unto you the power and commynge of our Lorde Jesus Christ.—2 Pet. i. 16. Geneva Version.
Whose coming is after the working of Satan with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish.—2 Thess. 9, 10. (A.V.)
Defalcation. A word at present of very slovenly and inaccurate use. We read in the newspapers of a ‘defalcation’ of the revenue, not meaning thereby an active lopping off (‘defalcatio’) of certain taxes with their proceeds, which would be the only correct use, but a passive falling short in its returns from what they previously were. Can it be that some confusion of ‘defalcation’ with ‘default,’ or at least a seeing of ‘fault’ and not ‘falx’ in its second syllable (there was once a verb ‘to defalk’), has led to this?
My first crude meditations, being always hastily put together, could never please me so well at a second and more leisurable review, as to pass without some additions, defalcations, and other alterations, more or less.—Sanderson, Sermons, 1671, Preface.
As for their conjecture that Zorobabel, at the building of this temple purposely abated of those dimensions assigned by Cyrus, as too great for him to compass, in such defalcation of measures by Cyrus allowed, he showed little courtship to his master the emperor, and less religion to the Lord his God.—Fuller, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, b. iii. c. 2.
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