(n.) A mystical word or collocation of letters written as in the figure. Worn on an amulet it was supposed to ward off fever. At present the word is used chiefly in jest to denote something without meaning; jargon.
Example Sentences:
(1) He has seen couples with very low numbers of eggs "and, abracadabra, they conceive naturally."
(2) There was an abracadabra moment when he announced that net debt was starting to fall, sooner than expected, but surprise immediately soured when the Office for Budget Responsibility tweeted that £20bn in asset sales were flattering the relevant figures.
(3) The Press Trust of India criticised the film for its "exotic India package – snake charmers in red turbans, magicians who say abracadabra and slum dwellers who speak pukka English".
Incantation
Definition:
(n.) The act or process of using formulas sung or spoken, with occult ceremonies, for the purpose of raising spirits, producing enchantment, or affecting other magical results; enchantment.
(n.) A formula of words used as above.
Example Sentences:
(1) It incants the motto of the Bill Shankly school of cliche: that football is not a matter of life and death, it is far more important.
(2) Judi Dench and Dustin Hoffman star as neighbours Mrs Silver and Mr Hoppy, who are brought together when Hoppy whispers a magic growth spell to Silver’s pet tortoise, then attempts to bring the incantation’s power to fruition.
(3) Place names and plant names assume the status of chants or litanies: spectral taxa incanted as elegy, or as a means to conjure back.
(4) Take the cue from Classic FM's manic incantation, "Just relax".
(5) Elements of Western psychological medical methods (such as environmental manipulation, enquiry into the unconscious motivation of behaviour, and suggestion through incantation) were evident in this practice, although applied without the systematic coherence of clinical medicine.
(6) Beyoncé’s use of “slay” is an additional embrace of the language of the black queer community and, in its repetition, it’s an incantation that can slay haters, slay patriarchy, to slay white supremacy.
(7) It was, said one contemporary, like watching "a magician, performing his incantations in public".
(8) She'd snarl like an angry Dylan or croon with tenderness, punctuating Lenny Kaye's guitar work with murmured incantations.
(9) A familiar ritual played out each Saturday night in autumn, beginning with tension-creating music and the basso profundo of Peter Dickson, whose pause-laden announcements made his voice as recognisable to British viewers as Richard Dimbleby's had been half a century earlier, and ending with the magical incantations "calls cost 50p from landlines, mobile networks may vary" and "please ask the bill-payer's permission", which caused millions of digits to press urgently on keypads.
(10) Some interesting points that emanated from the study include the healers' explanation that a person's essence is transmitted to his personal effects, which are used with incantation to inflict the deaf person.
(11) Long to reign over us – that old incantation has worked, so next week the Queen’s reign becomes the longest ever.
(12) In his article, 'The Effectiveness of Symbols,' Lévi-Strauss contends that the details of a Cuna birth incantation evoke specific physiological responses from parturient women, aiding them through difficult labors.
(13) Witches at Their Incantations (perhaps illustrating his own poem Strega), in the National Gallery, is a hideous nocturnal fantasy of the black sabbath, full of skeletal monstrosities, a hanged man, stolen babies, naked hags and evil brews.
(14) "I have friends who come by and say 'Om' [a Buddhist incantation]," he said.
(15) Inside the Palais, the delegates recite his name like an incantation.
(16) The meme artists got to work on that one, imagining covfefe might be Trump’s safe word, or else an incantation that could summon an ancient spirit wizard from the deep .
(17) But there were also real concession to the Kurds: the scrapping of Turkish nationalist school incantations that Kurdish children have to intone every day; the likelihood of bigger and easier Kurdish representation in the Ankara parliament; Kurdish parties allowed to campaign in their own language and to benefit more easily from state funding.
(18) His argument, which analyzes the incantation as a text divorced from its social setting, has drawn criticism from students of Cuna society on a number of substantive points, primarily centering around the difficulties that the special linguistic form of ritual language would present to a non-adept.
(19) If the patient lacks a thorough comprehension of the mythic details, how can the incantation change her physiological processes?
(20) Yet institutions and ideologies cannot survive by mere incantation or reminders of past horrors.