Word: hypnotist
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...until a new fashion is on everyone else's back. . . . Put your hands around your waist, just above your hips. This is your waistline. The line goes up, rounded and small, to a defined and shapely bosom." Harper's, having first proclaimed in a kind of hypnotist's monotone that "already you are noticing [that] heavy, bulky shoulder pads are annoying you," now went unconcernedly on: "You may add to your hip-periphery by tying on extra hip pads." The real thing, it explained, "is to clear your mind of all silhouette fixations...
...Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was originally, a weird, ferocious melodrama about a power-mad hypnotist (Werner Krauss) and his tool, a murderous somnambulist (Conrad Veidt). It was intended as an attack on authoritarianism. But the director cooked up a story "frame" (i.e., he had the main story told by an asylum inmate) which made the heroes (and the authors) seem mad. Authority emerged as a benign force, and the whole point of the original story was sidetracked. The popular device of the "framing story," Dr. Kracauer explains, shows the German mind introversively withdrawing into a shell...
Even California has produced no more overripe character than Dahish the Amazer, a dynamic hypnotist who set himself up in Lebanon as a second Christ, built up an ardent circle of cultists. At the top of his vogue, in 1944, the souks (bazaars) of Beirut peddled many a rumor of orgies in his modern villa in the Mazraa section of the city. Over their tea at the Patisserie Suisse, over cocktails at the seaside Normandie, Beirutis whispered that Dahish was getting into trouble with the Government. Lebanon's good, round President, Sheikh Bechara El Khoury, frowned on Dahish...
Thereafter Dahish was not long for Lebanon. Police nabbed him, beat him up, whisked him across the mountains to Aleppo in Syria. The battered hypnotist went off to live quietly in the little village of Kamishli in the Jezireh, on the upper reaches of the Euphrates...
...subjects went so deep asleep that Hypnotist Peter Casson, in the flesh, had to wake them up. As a result of this private test, BBC decided to ban hypnotists from telecasting, pending further experiment. (One wag promptly suggested that there was no danger of British listeners being hypnotized to sleep; the somnolent BBC needed hypnotists to keep them awake.) "My goodness," said one BBC official, "think what would happen if everybody had a television set-as everybody will shortly-and a Hitler sort of fellow started working on them...