Monday, August 27, 2012
A Sort of Abracadabra Spell
John Halsham (pseudonym of George Forrester Scott, 1864-1937), Lonewood Corner: A Countryman's Horizons (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1907), pp. 3-4:
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In reply to a few hints that there are here and there pedantic leanings to be discovered, and a too liberal sprinkling of quotations and tags in the dead languages, I would ask the anti-classical rebukers to skip the offending scraps, and believe that they are an old sort of Abracadabra spell, which, even if it does not conjure, as some old-fashioned people declare it does, is at least harmless to robuster minds, and may be avoided without seriously dislocating the text.
