Word: hocus-pocus
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...enough was the housewife's normal milk problem: how to get a bottle of good milk cheap despite a hocus-pocus of trade names, grades and delivery methods. Much worse is the problem now threatening: how to get milk...
...CASE OF THE DROWNING DUCK- Erle Stanley Gardner-Morrow ($2). Perry Mason, hired to investigate an 18-year-old California murder mystery, saves a likable youngster from the results of his hocus-pocus with detergents, runs a crook to earth, and solves two contemporary poisonings. Enough plot and action for two novels...
...Coach Alonzo Stiner and his Northwest farmers were not the least bit awed by Wallace Wade's Blue Devils. With Don Durdan, a left-handed right halfback, and Bob Dethman, a right-handed left halfback, carrying out clever hocus-pocus despite a drizzling rain, they fooled the Devils, scored the biggest upset since Columbia tripped Stanford in 1934. Score...
...past several weeks it has been clear that the Germans have been giving the keystone plenty of attention. This time they varied somewhat the play acting that goes with standard Nazi infiltration. Instead of the usual hocus-pocus about being "tourists," they assumed new roles. A large number were reported to have debarked at Beirut from a hospital ship as fake-wounded, bandaged, limping and laughing. Others, blond, husky, erect, entered via Turkey under bogus passports as refugee Rumanian Jews, their suitcases marked with large Js. At Aleppo, German officers were strutting about in shorts, apparently made up as sportsmen...
Despite all the traditional hocus-pocus of bands and bunting, platform committees and "keynote" oratory, the forms and panoply had no more meaning than they had had at Philadelphia, before Wendell Willkie and his freshening forces swept the Republicans' fog away. To the Convention's keynoter, Alabama's William Brockman Bankhead, the 1940 campaign seemed to be nothing more than a necessary footnote. Said he: "The minds of the American people are now so deeply engrossed in . . . the preservation of our established order of life and institutions, that they will have no tolerance for the superficial banalities...