MAGIC WORDS • Mystic importance Judge Benjamin Kaplan wrote of the "oddity of accepting . . . an enlargement of copyright while yet intoning the abracadabra of idea and expression" (quoted in Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig [2004]). • Mystique "The costuming, pageantry, and general abracadabra had attracted him to the Masonic ritual in the first place, just as the theatricalism of the conjurer's art had lured him to the money-digging of his youth." -- Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (1995) • Nonsensical babble "The Egyptologists make nothing out of it but abracadabra." -- Patrick Geryl, The Orion Prophecy: Will the World Be Destroyed in 2012 (2002) "[U]nintelligible 'abracadabras.'" -- John R. Donahue, The Gospel of Mark (2002) • Out of the blue -- Tom Spanbauer, In the City of Shy Hunters (2001) • Prayer "'Abracadabra, great Siva,' prayed Gottfried." -- Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades (1998) • Ritualistic utterance "Ritualistic utterances . . . whether made up of words that had symbolic significance at other times, of words in foreign or obsolete tongues, or of meaningless syllables, may be regarded as consisting in large part of pre- symbolic uses of language: that is, accustomed sets of noises which convey no information, but to which feelings . . . are attached. Such utterances rarely make sense to anyone not a member of the group. The abracadabra of a lodge meeting is absurd to anyone not a member of the lodge. When language becomes ritual, its effect becomes, to a considerable extent, independent of whatever signification the words once possessed." -- S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action: Fifth Edition (1991) "[A]ll they really wanted was to do the abracadabra and get the hell out." -- Yvonne Navarro, Shattered Twilight (2004) • Secret "[H]e practiced the abracadabra of calling dogs." -- Beryl Markham, West with the Night (1982) • Spiritual connection "If you make abracadabra with spirits you can get money from them." -- Wole Soyinka, The Road (1965) • "Superstition" -- Susan Albers, Eating Mindfully (200 ) "The United States retains, unusually for an advanced industrial society, about the same per capita level of religious superstition as Bangladesh. What one of Jimmy Carter's aides once referred to as the 'abracadabra vote' is ample." -- Francis Wheen, Idiot Proof: Deluded Celebrities, Irrational Power Brokers, Media Morons, and the Erosion of Common Sense (2004)