Chrysti the Wordsmith > Radio Scripts

Lately on CTW we've been examining reduplications -- quirky pairs of rhyming words like hanky panky and helter skelter -- that have interesting implications and unusual life histories.

Under today's etymological microscope we find hocus pocus -- meaning deceit, trickery or (to define one reduplication with another) flim-flam.

Word hunters have offered several explanations for the origin of hocus pocus. The story most often quoted in respectable dictionaries evokes the Latin words uttered in a Catholic mass at the moment of transubstantiation: hoc est corpus, "this is the body." It's said that magicians and conjurers, in an attempt to dazzle audiences would shout out a corruption of this solemn Latin formula, hocus pocus, at the climax of a trick. By the 17th century, the magician's acts of trickery and prestidigitation became known generally as hocus pocus.

The OED says that by the 1600s, Hocus Pocus had become a nickname for not only magicians but jugglers as well. A quotation from 1634 says, "A Persian Hocus-Pocus...performed rare trickes with hands and feet." And Shakespeare, in Henry IV writes, "I incline to call him hocus-pocus, or some juggler, or attendant upon the master of the hobbyhorse."

Hocus Pocus -- the art of trickery and deceit: what does your dictionary say about the origin of this ancient reduplication?

Radio Script > Hocus Pocus