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Hocus-pocus is a method or belief you think is built on false ideas — talk, empty ceremony, a trick dressed up as wisdom. People use it when they do not trust the thing: a sales pitch, a “secret system,” a serious-looking show with nothing in it. It is playful, a little , and not formal. Magicians used to shout “hocus-pocus” as pretend Latin while they did a trick, and that is how the word got its colour. Though actually, some old churchmen claimed it twisted the Latin of the Mass (“hoc est enim corpus meum”), but that story is not generally accepted; it started as fake Latin that made up.
故弄玄虛、騙人的把戲
組成Made-up Latin that 17th-century conjurers shouted during tricks. One man even performed under the name Hocus Pocus. The idea that it twists the Mass words “hoc est enim corpus meum” was an old sermon guess and is not generally accepted.
原始詞典資料7 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
hocus-pocusintj/ˌhəʊkəs ˈpəʊkəs/
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A phrase used (by a stage magician, etc.) as a magical incantation to bring about some change: abracadabra, hey presto.
hocus-pocusnoun/ˌhəʊkəs ˈpəʊkəs/
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Some ineffectual action or speech, especially if intended to divert attention; nonsense.
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derogatoryReligious or supernatural phenomena one holds to be nonsense or mere trickery; superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
- How was it possible that I, a rational man, not unacquainted with the leading scientific facts of our history, and hitherto an absolute and utter disbeliever in all the hocus-pocus which in Europe goes by the name of the supernatural, could believe that I had within the last few minutes been engaged in conversation with a woman two thousand and odd years old?
- The ego thinks that his local time and space is all there is to reality, and that the busy affairs of state and trade are more important than a lot of obscurantist hocus-pocus.
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Some action carried out to bring about change as if by magic; a trick; sleight of hand, trickery.
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obsoleteA conjurer.
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obsoleteA conjurer's trick.
hocus-pocusverb/ˌhəʊkəs ˈpəʊkəs/
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datedTo play tricks or practise sleight of hand (on someone); (by extension) to cheat, to deceive.
- [T]hat which we call Good Humour, is in Truth but a ſort of Slight of Hand in Diſcourſe, or a Faculty of making Truths look like Appearances, or Appearances like Truths. Now this Gift of Hocus Pocuſing, and of Diſguiſing Matters, is ſo Surpriſing and Agreeable on the one hand, that it muſt of Neceſſity be a very ſtrong Temptation to the Quitting of the Beaten Road on the other.
- But it was possible to say something about Cahirciveen—that it has a nunnery, a market-house, a reading-room.^([sic]) and a Fever Hospital, and, being just two miles from the Valentia slate-quarry, that its houses are slated; but it was impossible to say a single word in defence of Derrynane Beg;—so the two, though seventeen miles apart, were “hocussed-pocussed” together, and it all went down as gospel in Conciliation Hall, that because the houses of Cahirciveen were slated from the quarry close by, ergo, my description of the wretched hovels of Derrynane Beg with their rotten potato-stalk thatches, was monstrously incorrect.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。