A • Diagram "Right now, unnoticed by the pilot of the big plane, Allard's hand was building a complicated pyramid of letters that looked like a mystic abraca dabra. Zigzagging lines between those letters, he gave potential meanings to dots and dashes in the body of Zanigew's message." -- Maxwell Grant, Shadow Over Alcatraz (19 8) • Diminishing, causing to disappear -- Laura Lippman, By A Spider's Thread (2004) "[R]oughly translated from a Chaldean word [abracadabra] means 'to diminish.'" -- Patricia Telesco, How to be a Wicked Witch (2001) • Divine utterance "[A] puff of smoke and a holy abracadabra." -- Lisa Samson, The Church Ladies (2001) • Exotic, otherworldly "[H]e longed to clear a way for himself into unknown territories, the abracadabra realms we feel inside which nobody dares to touch." -- David Grossman, See Under: LOVE (2002) "Unaware of their cage unless they try to leave it, the objects seem to float in the abracadabra realm of flying carpets." -- Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (1990) • Gibberish "The effect [of James Joyce's literary methods] at times is astounding, but the price paid is the entire dissolution of the very foundation of liter ary diction, the entire decomposition of literary method itself; for the lay reader the text has been turned into abracadabra." -- Sergei Eisenstein, Film Forum: Essays in Film Theory (1969) "If the encryption only yields abracadabra, something along the transmission path has gone wrong . . . The difference between messages that make sense and abracadabra might be subjective." -- M.H.M. Schellekens, Electronic Signatures Volume 5 (2004) • "Hippie-dippy airy-fairy baloney" -- Michael Crichton, Travels (1988) • "Host of the winged ones" (i.e., angels) This is an interpretation of the word Abrakad, from a prayer attributed to Rabbi Nehunya ban harKanah (Philip Schaff, The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. I). • "I bless the dead" -- A Dictionary of Angels (1997) • Inspired "[N]o abracadabra insights, just plain old hard work." -- Joseph J. Luciani, Self-Coaching: How to Heal Anxiety and Depression (2001) • Instantly "We'll have you some heat in here before you can say abracadabra, and you can put your money on it." -- Mark Edward Hall, Holocaust Opera (2004) "Reality is like a magic act, and magic by definition contradicts what we expected. But life's magic acts don't always have us applauding. Before