“TO PLAY FAST AND LOOSE”

“TO PLAY FAST AND LOOSE”

“TO PLAY FAST AND LOOSE” “TO PLAY FAST AND LOOSE” is a phrase that appears both in Love’s Labor’s Lost and in King John, and is attributed to Shakespeare almost as often as “It’s Greek to me.” But the OED finds the phrase in 1557 as the title of an epigram in a popular miscellany (what we would now call an “anthology”). The phrase originally referred to a sleight-of-hand trick.