Word: pocus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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HYPNOSIS. The original hocus-pocus has moved off the magician's stage and into the doctor's office. According to the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, 15,000 health professionals now practice the technique. While not a cure, making healthy suggestions to hypnotized patients, studies show, can help them heal faster, give up smoking and other bad habits, and feel less pain -- long after a session ends. One remarkable study showed that burn patients heal faster, with less pain and fewer complications, if they are put in a trance shortly after they are injured...
...made its way into several newspapers, was the work of Iben Browning, a New Mexico climate consultant, who based his forecast on an analysis of the gravitational pull of the sun and moon. Many seismologists, worried that public concern could degenerate into panic, have denounced it as unscientific hocus-pocus. At the same time, they agree that the New Madrid fault, which stretches over 225 km (140 miles), poses serious long-term risks, especially to the nearby cities of Memphis and St. Louis...
BELLE FICTION: In Praise of the Stepmother by Mario Vargas Llosa -- Would you believe an erotic family novel? The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- The autumn of Simon Bolivar. Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut -- Meditations of a Vietnam vet in 2001. Buffalo Girls by Larry McMurtry -- Calamity Jane, Bill Cody and Sitting Bull whoop it up. Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver -- Environmental catastrophe meets Native American mythology. The Final Club by Geoffrey Wolff -- Class warfare at Princeton during the 1950s. Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman -- Fictional characters caught up in the factual bombing of Move headquarters...
...quick, it was said, to detect the smell of society's insulation burning -- and to sigh "So it goes" -- when there was nothing more in the air than, say, a harmless whiff from a distant war or the neighborhood toxic-waste dump. No more; his news in Hocus Pocus is that our charred insulation no longer smolders. It has burned itself out, and civilization's great, tired machine is not dying, but blackened and dead...
...author's standby, the diary of a bemused old man who has survived civilization's downfall. Perhaps because of this resemblance to his other books, or simply because the freight of anger and disgust is so heavy it upsets the novel's balance, the element of Hocus Pocus that is storytelling seems perfunctory. Eugene Debs Hartke is the diarist, a gung-ho U.S. Army officer during the Vietnam War; then a professor of science at Tarkington, a college for dyslectics in New York State; then briefly the warden of a prison for blacks into which the college is transformed...