“Trick” is dlllos in Homeric Greek, and the oldest known use of the term refers to a quite specific trick: baiting a good to catch a fish.  East and west, north and south, this is the oldest trick in the book.  No trickster has ever been credited with inventing a potato peeler, a gas meter, a catechism, or a tuning fork, but trickster invents the fish trap.
—Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World (1998)