"Puckish" means "childishly mischievous". Price's career was described as "irreverent, puckish and infinitely bolder than most Hollywood execs". Historian J. H. Plumb speculates that Cleland's puckish and quarrelsome nature was to blame. He also had a puckish sense of humour. Yet the movie manipulates its audience in cunning and puckish ways. In the puckish manner of his underworld comrades they named him Rhyging.