Word: hocus-pocus
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...getters and promoters) are having less and less success in the eastern schools at their self imposed jobs of routing the students out of their dormitories to burn red fire in the square and mutter gibberish in union the night before a so called big game. This Medieval hocus-pocus known as "Getting Behind the Team," is being left behind in favor of an attitude which, in itself, may prove the most effective balance wheel to the sport. The undergraduates to whom I have spoken no longer regard their football teams as something akin to the defenders of the Grail...
...from the sky; an old witch ride madly astride her broomstick, pausing only to tickle the nose of a raggedy boy waiting to be fattened and baked into gingerbread. The climax came when his yellow-haired sister saved him with the wave of a magic juniper-branch and a hocus-pocus formula, when together they pushed the witch into the oven stoked for them. For children no moment of the performance approaches this supreme one in Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel...
...from appendicitis to housemaid's knee that is their business. The Pencil Man will not take from any patient more than three Austrian shillings (42?). He seldom pencils a man or woman for more than 30 seconds, treats hundreds of poor "patients" free. In 40 years of eccentric hocus-pocus he has never broken two rules: i) The groups he pencils must always be of assorted sexes, and always seminude; 2) He will pencil no one privately, though hundreds of prominent people, unwilling to endure the public ordeal, have sent him blank checks for a private consultation. He always...
...speaking into a transmitter, let the modulated current pass through his body to his finger tip to the man's ear. The man "heard" Mr. Grace's words. The man felt as though he were thinking Mr. Grace's phrases. It seemed like thought transference. No hocus-pocus was it, however, but an understandable, verifiable, physical-physiological hookup...
...taken, suddenly and forever, out of the world, into an unreal place. This last trick puzzles even people who know just how all the others are accomplished. When someone dies whom they have known, they may go to witch-doctors called mediums who pretend that by saying hocus-pocus or by going into a trance, they can make dead people say things to people who are living. This is false magic; humbler fellows who are content to imitate the mysteries of life and death with 52 cards, a white handkerchief and a tailcoat, are annoyed by such lying fakers; they...