Word: abracadabra
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...past week, a young housemaid went up the stairs of a big London house to awaken her master, John Singer Sargent. She found him dead on his pillow with a volume spread open, face down, on the reading table beside him. Physicians who arrived to pronounce the inevitable, grisly abracadabra, said that he had died in his sleep of an apoplectic seizure. So, at the age of 69, ended the life of an eminent and talented gentleman who has been recognized for the last 30 years as the greatest portrait painter of his period...
...while the air was charged with amendments, sub-amendments, remonstrance and counter remonstrance, orations cold and orations hot. Suddenly out sprang M. Poincaré from his little box, uttered a few short, sharp, subtle sentences making the passage of the bill a question of confidence in the Government, and ? abracadabra, the bill was passed by 408 votes to 127, thus completely reversing the minority vote of two days previous. This so moved M. Charles Bernard, a Deputy for Paris, that he said: "M. Poincaré swings this Chamber around as easily as Mussolini does Italy's, but with somewhat more tact...
...Fabric of Thought" includes three essays, which are called respectively, "Abracadabra: The Riddle of the Sphinx--An Inspiration": "Bubbles: The Riddle of Life--A Study: and "Gossamer: The Riddle of the Future--A Fancy". These are highly fantastic titles, but no more so than the subject matter warrants. One is forced to read several chapters before one is convinced that the whole thing is not a great, super-developed hoax, and from then on, the utmost concentration is required to follow the writer's logic at all. The first essay consists of a most elaborate and painstaking demonstration...
...Abracadabra! What of that...