Word: pocus
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...political measure Garner is a good-natured loblolling cowhand who, through the political hocus-pocus that nowadays passes for government, has been drawing his breath, cigar and salary for seven years, and saying nothing, because he knows nothing, while twelve million people have had the opportunity, on relief, to become inured to the blessings of government by "the common people...
Before last week's bout. Manager Grippo performed his dressing-room hocus-pocus as usual. Then, for good measure, he went to Tiger Fox, put the Indian sign on him behind his back. Just before the opening gong, Hypnotist Grippo ambled over to the Negro's corner, tried to catch his eye, while 2,000 squealing Beaconites went wild in the gallery...
Reason for this ghoulish hocus-pocus was that a minor Elizabethan historian of doubtful veracity once wrote that when Spenser was buried, a cluster of poets, including Shakespeare, placed poems in their own handwriting in his grave. For 20 years the Baconian Society has been pleading to have the grave examined, arguing that comparison of the handwriting of the poems would prove once & for all that it was Bacon who wrote Shakespeare...
...Malay word presumed to mean "fur and feathers." For authentic fur-&-feather footage, Cinemad-venturer Clyde Elliott (Bring 'Em Back Alive) toted his cameras to Northern Malaya. Paramount sheared away most of what he brought back, brushed up a Booloo of its own, a crude hocus-pocus about a white tiger, worshiped by Sakai tribesmen and kept in good fur on a diet of maidens...
...unintended indictment of the forms & symbols that circumscribe its people, The Dybbuk is important. As cinema it is tedious, technically crude, lacking in coherence. Here and there are pictorial groupings, interesting enough in themselves, but poorly related in the general clutter of hyper-religious abracadabra and the familiar hocus-pocus of third-rate melodrama. The mere mention of Kabala brings on thunder-and-lightning overtones; a departing soul is the signal for banging casements, flickering candles, fluttering curtains. Valiantly pushing its way through is a slender story of a boy (L. Libgold) and a girl (Lili Liliana) promised to each...