hocus-pocuser
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: hocus-pocusers
form: hocus pocuser
form: hocus-pocusser
Etymology: From hocus-pocus + -er.
Senses: examples: text: Such may be the interpretation of this phrase; and such may be the sense in which thousands of democrats will take it; but such is not the sense in which the Texas hocus pocusers mean it.
ref: 1844 August 3, “The Presidential Campaign”, in Niles’ National Register, volume LXVI, number 1,714, Baltimore, Md., page 371, column 2:
text: Old Plu had promised, as per Admiral Fitzroy’s patent hocus-pocusser, to give us a taste of his quality; and it is unnecessary, in this connection, to observe that the venerable disciple of Swithin the Saint was as good as his word.
ref: 1890 July 26, “O’Flaherty in England. Arrival of the Champion. His Reception. What he Thinks of England.”, in Punch, or The London Charivari, volume XCIX, London: […] the Office, […], page 48, column 1:
text: And when they make the still further complaint that unless they worm their way into the personal favor of the reviewers by hocus-pocus of one sort or another, such as seeking advice on actors, beseeching a conference over a play manuscript, u. s. w., they will receive treatment not so kind as that vouchsafed a more proficient hocus-pocuser, they say, too, what may or may not, for aught I know, be true.
ref: 1925, George Jean Nathan, “The House of Satan”, in The American Mercury, page 501, columns 1–2:
text: A well-known movie actress (who rose to fame in the last year) just bought up her old negatives from M. Korman, the hocus-pocusser. They included several nudes …
ref: 1940 March 15, Walter Winchell, “On Broadway”, in The Dayton Herald, volume LXI, number 64, Dayton, Oh., page 38, column 8:
text: Howard Brooks, the hocus pocuser at Esquire, will break in one new trick and two new gags next week …
ref: 1941 February 1, “Terry Lawlor Opens At Esquire Tonight; Ruth Petty At Dempsey’s; More Club News”, in Miami Daily News, volume XLVI, number 52, Miami, Fla., page 7, column 5:
text: YOUR SENTRY on the Dawn Patrol will have a very tough time of it this evening. It seems that everybody has suddenly decided on a new show. The Clover Club brings in an entirely new one, with the Velero sisters, the hocus pocusser Guili-Guili and others.
ref: 1942 February 13, Jack Kofoed, “The Night Watch: I Need Roller Skates”, in Miami Daily News, volume XLVII, number 65, Miami, Fla., page 5B, column 1:
text: THE latest hocus-pocuser to adopt the art of magic as a means of selling safety is Sgt. Carl S. Pike, of the Kent County sheriff’s office, Grand Rapids, Mich.
ref: 1954 March 27, Bill Sachs, “Hocus-Pocus”, in The Billboard, page 42, column 1:
text: A crew of table-tapping thaumaturgists and paint-pot hocus-pocussers is now at work with runes and incantations, said Mesmerist Green (who in ordinary life, Director of Choral Music and dramatic coach at Delaware Valley High), transforming the theatre stage into the living room of the pleasant English country home owned by Charles Condomine, the hero—or victim—of the haunted hilarity.
ref: 1958 May 29, “‘Blithe Spirit’ to Haunt Milford Theatre May 30-31”, in Pike County Dispatch, number 33, Milford, Pa., pages 1 and 5, column 3:
text: Best known of the early “talking” horses was Morocco, shown here with Banks, the British magician. Seventeenth-century audiences believed that both horse and hocus-pocuser consorted with the devil.
ref: 1962, Milbourne Christopher, Panorama of Magic, New York, N.Y.: Dover Publications, →ISBN, page 9:
text: For the hocus-pocussers, choice between alternative analyses was a matter of mere personal taste and certainly not of correct versus incorrect; there was no ‘right answer’, so it was pointless to worry about cases such as the one cited.[…]One suspects that the hocus-pocussers may have been happy enough to regard linguistic descriptions as true so long as the descriptive techniques worked unproblematically, and that they simply held the hocus-pocus position in reserve to be used if they encountered an impasse such as the Chinese case described above.
ref: 1980, Geoffrey Sampson, “The Descriptivists”, in Schools of Linguistics, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, →ISBN, page 72:
text: ‘And you are a slanderer!’ / ‘Uncle, I beg you—!’ / ‘Look out! What are you trying to do? You’ll knock over the table!’ / ‘Medieval hocus pocuser!’ / ‘Vilifier! Liar!’
ref: 1986, Paula Reibel, A Morning Moon, Corgi Books, →ISBN, page 100:
text: Unfortunately Hutton is very misleading about the hocus-pocus position when, speaking for the hocus-pocusser, he compares the relation of the representation of a sentence to a particular utterance with the relation between a picture of a horse and what that picture depicts, when the picture is not a portrait of an actual horse.
ref: 1993, Language Sciences, page 435:
text: Strange or not, the hocus-pocus linguist holds that we cannot invoke descriptive fidelity as a criterion for choosing between different representations. In the light of this, Sampson questions whether the pure ‘hocus-pocusser’ would have any incentive to continue in linguistics.[…]However, it is evident that Robins, like Firth, cannot be classified as a hocus-pocusser.[…]A more purely hocus-pocus form of argument that the would-be hocus-pocusser might adopt runs as follows.
ref: 1993, Christopher Hutton, “Analysis and notation: the case for a non-realist linguistics”, in Rom Harré, Roy Harris, editors, Linguistics and Philosophy: The Controversial Interface (Language & Communication Library; volume 13), Pergamon Press, →ISBN, pages 166–168:
glosses: One who hocus-pocuses.