Word: abracadabra
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...that should lodge in the hands of men who wish to do and act has moved strangely into the hands of men who had no vision but that of the past, and of men whose political hatred for the direction of American life made them believe that through some abracadabra of legal learning they could turn it backward. ... In this contest of power between a handful of men and a Nation, no longer lethargic but vocal and tense, there can be no question as to the final outcome...
...arrangement and has substituted clarity and logic. Many sensitive heartstrings may quiver at the thought of corrupting English 2 into English 22; to some the progression from the Anglo-Saxon of 3a through the Elizabethan of 32 and the Alexandrian of 50b to the Georgian of 26 may spell abracadabra. Nevertheless, hoary-headed tradition must retire to its armchair when faced with a definite improvement...
...young advisers who went down with the U. S. delegation. Back in Washington Adviser Warburg spent a futile hour trying to make the President see the error of his ways. After that Mr. Warburg ceased being an adviser. The Money Muddle is his full-length attack on the financial abracadabra of the New Deal. "In the hope that he would have liked this book" it is dedicated to his father, the late great Paul Moritz Warburg of Federal Reserve System fame. It represents a not too conservative banker's criticism of the Roosevelt monetary policies. Wrong is the gold...
...major athletic events in many an American institution of learning. The bonfire, the snake dance, and the night shirt parade are no doubt wholesome fun, but they are burdens which the scholastic atmosphere of Cambridge has long been spared. A terse crystallization of the local attitude toward such childish abracadabra, shared by team and student body alike, was given in the 1928-29 Athletic Report by Mr. Bingham, when he said that "more and more we are happily getting away from the too serious side of intercollegiate athletics. Mass meetings have become obsolete, and I hope we shall never return...
...Wernigerode, Germany, some hundred skeptical psychic researchers climbed to the top of Mt. Brocken at night, smeared a goat with blood, honey and the scrapings of church bells, incanted the Latin Abracadabra. Urta Bohn, selected as being "a maiden pure in heart," officiated. Said Fraulein Bohn: "I guess I am as well qualified as any girl nowadays." The experiment, to discredit an old superstition by failing to change the goat into a young man, was successful. Next day Maiden Bohn was in bed with a severe cold...