Word: mumbo
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...Dicey, Mumbo and Sheikie were bosomless chums at St. Agatha's, an all-too-proper girls' school in the south of England. They carried on like so many Peck's bad boys in bloomers, planted a gelignite bomb in a bicycle shed, conned free rides in horse-drawn victorias, raced down High Street frothing at the mouth with lemon sherbet powder to convince townspeople that they were possessed by devils. But their biggest adventure in that ill-fated summer of 1914 came the night they buried a coffer of "valuable treasure"-dog chains, bones, a message...
...Little Girls is that those who would excavate the tells of childhood had better dig alone. Sheikie, "the famous child toe-dancer" of St. Agatha's, has degenerated into Sheila Artworth, a real estate broker's wife whose hair is now bluer than her blood. Mumbo, the skinny, frizzy-headed intellectual of the trio, has ballooned into Miss Clare Burkin-Jones, the burly, beturbaned boss of a London gift shop. But these distortions are nothing compared with the heightened powers of bitchery the little girls have acquired...
Suspicious of one another's motives, they flash aged but envenomed claws. Dicey accuses the unmarried Mumbo of lesbianism, wonders why Sheikie has no children. Mumbo wonders why Sheikie never made it as a dancer, accuses her of social climbing. Both Mumbo and Sheikie are suspicious of Dicey's relationship to her dusky butler...
...Rehallowing was required because several days before, four men had been surprised while in the midst of a mysterious ritual inside Westham's 11th century church of St. Mary the Virgin. "The men were trying to communicate with evil spirits," declared Coulthurst. "They were chanting some sort of mumbo jumbo. They were definitely in league with the devil...
...creative tradition, has always had to fight for recognition in its own backyard. To the natives who practiced it, it was less art for art's sake than a deadly serious business of magic, medicine, fetish and religion. To most white colonizers. African art has always been a mumbo-jumbo sort of thing, "proof" that the native African lacked cultural instincts...