Word: pocus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
Take four shop-talking doctors, a renegade artist with revolutionary ideas of morality, two more, less brilliant, medicos, and a very beautiful woman. Throw in a smattering of medical hokus-pocus, a cure for tuberculosis, two cases of that disease, and a love affair. Now you have some of the ingredients of George Bernard Shaw's merry play which Katharine Cornell has brought to Boston. One of the four doctors has the new cure, and the love affair. The two cases of the disease are given to the fifth doctor and the artist. The dilemma is this; Should the doctor...
...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...
...yards through the line. Frankie Albert, their southpaw passer, flipped a beautiful pitch to little Pete Kmetovic, who scampered into the clear, ran 14 yards, crossed the goal line standing up. A few minutes later, the Indians were back on Washington's 20-yard line. A little hocus-pocus-and they scored another touchdown. Just for good measure, in the last few minutes of play Stanford's little Kmetovic intercepted a pass, trotted over the line again. Final score...
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...