shuffle the cards

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English

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Verb

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shuffle the cards (third-person singular simple present shuffles the cards, present participle shuffling the cards, simple past and past participle shuffled the cards)

  1. (figuratively) To reorganize or restructure an organization or situation.
    • 2005, Julia Pascal, Women in Theatre, page 103:
      Things often look as though they have radically changed; whereas they have just taken on opposite appearances, as they so often do, to shuffle the cards and set people on a side track.
    • 2015, Peter Drucker, Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism, page 123:
      Lesbian bohemians whose economic status was less secure and whose lives were less would-be-conventional, like surrealists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, were sometimes less clearly inverted or more inclined to play with gender ('shuffle the cards') in proto-queer ways.
    • 2015, Eli Avidar, The Abyss: Bridging the Divide between Israel and the Arab World:
      It shuffled the cards in our region and changed the perception that Israel is an undefeatable country.
    • 2017, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Impossible Revolution:
      His example shows that the mukhabarat play a role that goes beyond dirty tricks: they are also adept at shuffling the cards in order to manipulate the minds and attitudes of the public.
    • 2022, Raphael Israeli, Human Rights and Human Development in the Arab and Islamic World:
      But the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Khumeini shuffled the cards, in fact unwittingly serving as the precursor of the Islamic Spring.
    • 2022, Simona Salvo, The School of Mathematics at Rome’s University Campus, page 264:
      When the university was reformed in the Eighties, changes in the organization of the School shuffled the cards in such a way that data does not allow us to compare numbers.
  2. (figurative) To randomize an ongoing process.
    • 1902, William Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, page 463:
      Progress in one quarter only implies retrogression in another; human endeavor with its victories and its failures means no more than that the Absolute is shuffling the cards.
    • 2007, Luca Iandoli, Giuseppe Zollo, Organizational Cognition and Learning:
      This is the same as shuffling the cards and adding diversity to the system, that otherwise would have been excessively influenced by the choice of the initial population.
    • 2009, Joseph Seckbach, Divine Action and Natural Selection, page 749:
      Creatures therefore do NOT have to shuffle all the cards completely from scratch every time, so the probability of a viable result (and hence the probability of an improvement in fitness) is vastly higher than would be predicted by classical statistics.
  3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see shuffle,‎ cards.
    • 2000, Kirsten Larsen, Princesses Pull-Out Posters and Game Cards, page 31:
      Shuffle the cards and deal out four cards to each player.

Translations

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Further reading

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