(v. t.) To cast out, as a devil, evil spirits, etc., by conjuration or summoning by a holy name, or by certain ceremonies; to expel (a demon) or to conjure (a demon) to depart out of a person possessed by one.
(v. t.) To deliver or purify from the influence of an evil spirit or demon.
Example Sentences:
(1) The draw was enough to take England to the finals in Japan, where Beckham exorcised the demons of four years earlier by scoring the only goal (a dubiously awarded penalty) in the defeat of Argentina.
(2) The ghosts of Barbara Castle and Peter Shore , never mind Hugh Gaitskell (and, for much of his life, Harold Wilson), were never quite exorcised by the New Labour Europhiles.
(3) Woods certainly appears to have exorcised the demons that have haunted him in recent years, after his world collapsed in spectacular circumstances four years ago.
(4) The next day I began to draw, half-copying the woodcuts from the Chronicle, half exorcising my memory.
(5) Three minutes before the break Andy Taylor, a player with his own Wembley demons to exorcise having missed a crucial penalty here in the 2012 League One play-off final shootout when with Sheffield United, sent a dipping volley narrowly over the bar.
(6) In his unpretentious and beautifully written book, Guinness exorcised a long-suppressed anxiety about his origins.
(7) Mark Hoban has "ghosts to exorcise" from his bright corner office in Whitehall.
(8) Children and their services have been prey to causes célèbres, fashion and the exaggerated fads and foibles of the media and politicians; they have thrived best when society and their carers were tolerant, and loving, sought good qualities to augment, not evil to exorcise, and succeeded in balancing structure and control with flexibility and freedom to grow.
(9) Government officials say the trials, which human rights groups have criticised for failing to observe due process, are necessary to "exorcise historical ghosts".
(10) Psychoanalytic treatment is a cognitive technique for "exorcising" certain identifications by delineating them and then neutralizing them through understanding.
(11) The topic, again, is love and its discontents – Ware recently married and wanted to exorcise the ghosts of previous relationships.
(12) But there is a great deal of sympathy for the young team which is under immense pressure to win the World Cup on home turf and exorcise memories of the defeat by Uruguay in the 1950 final at the Maracanã.
(13) It sounded like a werewolf exorcising a roomful of crucified sopranos.)
(14) Brazilian Marcelo Huertas fed Larry Nance Jr for an alley-oop dunk in the fourth that had the fans cheering, seemingly exorcising the demons of another losing season for the once-proud franchise with the league’s third-worst record.
(15) Obama's foreign policy presidency has, in many respects, been an exercise in exorcising the demons of Iraq – and the mindset that made the war possible – from the American psyche.
(16) One of the offenders suggests that it's to exorcise the guilt he feels about Nannie's son James.
(17) Why break into song and dance to exorcise your inner emotions when you can talk yourself through it?
(18) It wasn't until the 1980s that he commanded his fiction to shine a documentary torch into his own life, to illuminate, and perhaps to exorcise his Shanghai ghosts.
(19) The demand that gay people “repent” or be exorcised (as one Nigerian bishop attempted with a gay campaigner in 1998) was neither acceptable nor even comprehensible in England by 2008, and still less today.
(20) Everyone now and then wants a hug.” Gasquet, who exorcised the demons of last year when he lost to Kyrgios in five sets and forfeited nine match points, said his opponent was “a very nice guy” but “was a little bit angry, a little bit frustrated” during the contentious episode in the second set.
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.