4 MAGIC WORDS gems that lie in the three stone coffers will never shine round the neck of an earthly beauty. They and Foulata's bones will keep cold company till the end of all things." -- H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines (1885) • Shortcut "I . . . knew the shortcut, the open sesame." -- Philippe Sollers, Event (1987) "Here is the open-sesame way of representing the problem." -- Jake Copeland, Artificial Intelligence (199 ) • Skeleton key "There is . . . a certain kind of 'open sesame' which seems less a charm than a skeleton key." -- Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) "This increase in wealth and the prospect of its acceleration had be come a kind of master-key, the ideological open-sesame of society." -- Roy Porter, English Society in the 18th Century (1982) "Back in high school and college, they had pored over books, believ ing that knowledge alone was the open sesame to financial and professional rewards." -- Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (19 6) • Solution "[A] magic 'open sesame' to all our problems . . ." -- A. Trevor Hodge, Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply (2002) • Starting point "[C]ertain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous force. They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame of some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can be built." -- Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (197 ) "[The heart of a white cock] was the open sesame to many experiments." -- Idries Shah, Oriental Magic (1956) • Stimuli, especially "the correct stimuli" -- Leslie Glass, Stealing Time (2000) • Trigger -- Melvin Burgess, Doing It (2004) • Voilà "Aziz squeezes once, then releases her. 'Open sesame,' he says, 'the spell is broken.'" -- Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent (200 ) "It was like a story out of a library book: he said the magic words and -- Open, Sesame! -- something amazing happened." -- Pete Hamill, Snow in August (1997) • Wide open "A door left even slightly ajar is 'open sesame' to a cunning ferret." -- Gary Bucsis and Barbara Somerville, The Ferret Handbook (2001) "[T]he world split wide open, open sesame, for motorcycle entry only." -- Laurie Gough, Kite Strings of the Southern Cross (1999)