Word: abracadabra
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...enacted time after time, the routine by now is familiar. The magician's assistant is handcuffed and placed in a sack, which is tied and put into a trunk. The trunk is in turn secured with locks and chains. The magician, standing atop the trunk, briefly raises a curtain. Abracadabra. Suddenly, the magician's assistant stands in the place of the magician -- and when the trunk is unlocked, it is the magician who pops out of the sack, hands tightly manacled...
Sloganeering won't help. Nor will tedious or evasive rhetoric. Tough talk, task forces, and fiscal abracadabra are poor substitutes for aggressive proposals, and they're self-defeating...
...crowds with small, impromptu gigs in which he would make white penknives turn black and rubber balls multiply. His pièce de résistance occurred at China's most magical setting: the Great Wall. There Wilson chose a young volunteer and, without so much as an abracadabra or its Mandarin equivalent, set her afloat in midair. "You don't need words to do magic," he says. "Magic itself is a universal language...