Word: abracadabra
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...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...
...Catskills, where he grew up, partly to reminisce and partly to look up Peggy Ann (Ann-Margret), the girl he worshipped from afar in high school. He still loves her; her husband is on a "quick business trip" due to personal problems, and before you can say "abracadabra" the bed sheets start heaving. The only problem is that Fats, who has grown quite talkative, feels a little jealous...
...initiations and in morning discourses attended by 1,000 or more motionless visitors, Rajneesh is a master of psychodrama. As he explained bluntly to Malkin, "The whole abracadabra is just to console you. It is a toy. The purpose of sanyas is so that you go on hanging around, so that a single sound from me, or just a look, will bring you that moment of enlightenment." So potent is that effect that most of the ashram's 200 permanent residents no longer bother to listen to the guru's words. "It's the presence that matters...
Arithmetical Abracadabra. For two days, the Administration trio painstakingly elaborated the President's case for increased revenue. The cost of the war, along with domestic spending, is running as much as $8 billion higher than anticipated last January. The surcharge would bring in $6.3 billion in the current fiscal year, and, along with other tax adjustments, would reduce a horrendous national budget deficit of $29 billion to between $14 billion and $18 billion. Thus, they argued, the surcharge is vital therapy for an economy whose current expansion (see U.S. BUSINESS) threatens, if unchecked, to result in a new spiral...
...economy had built up sufficient impetus to resist the recessional impact of higher taxes. A more prudent course, they reasoned, would be to reduce domestic spending-though few Congressmen could agree on the programs to be cut. Some citizens felt that the President's experts were practicing arithmetical abracadabra to justify the surcharge. "Now you see it, now you don't," siehed Wisconsin's John Byrnes after Schultze projected a $2 billion saving on the sale of "participation certificates," which, committee members thought, amounted to an elaborate form of federal borrowing...