mountebank

Mencken described Bryan as “a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity.”

“He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank . . .” But, unlike Bryan and Trump, Kissinger had a deep sense of purpose.

Forget the Tinder swindler — how about the MI5 mountebank?

And part was rooted in a kind of self-education — an exploration of how Ricky Potash, unhappy child in Elizabeth, N.J., became Ricky Jay, “The Scholar Mountebank,” as the playwright David Mamet, his close friend, once described him.

Was it not a dangerous word, too closely connected to Hobbes and to dubious stories about sympathetic magic told by Digby—someone whom John Evelyn, another early member, could dismiss as an arrant mountebank?