Abracadabrant

Such was J. T. Maston. No wonder his colleagues had every confidence in him when he undertook to solve the wildest abracadabrant calculations that occurred to their audacious brains!

It was also Gounod, who, at the performance of Manon, finished his praise of a morceau by this abracadabrant phrase, ‘I find it octogone!’

As for the snobs at Bayreuth, they undergo “an abracadabrant initiation into the mysteries of the parsifalian chimæra”!

Courteix displayed motifs for embroideries and lacework which ladies will welcome with enthusiasm, while Abel Landry showed an ensemble of work at once varied and homogeneous: a sofa, chairs, a desk, a tea-service, and a bonbonnière—a whole set of what we may call “woman’s furniture,” which, by its simplicity and its fine and elegant appearance, is quite refreshing after the abracadabrant experiments wherewith we are, alas! only too familiar.

The more I see of moving pictures the less I am able to understand many abracadabrant things about them.

But although Abraham was largely illiterate, the biblical texts were familiar to him. After drawing up a salutation which read: “To M. le Cardinal, very honourable chevalier de la légion, our welcome Commissaire of the Empire, of the Port Royal of France, of the administration of the bagne, of the city of the Just, the faithful town of Brest”, he reeled off a whole rosary of quotations from scripture, just as abracadabrant as the sample just given, then gushed for a time about his sad fate, “the poor father of six poor little children”, before he got down to brass tacks.

A saying that her mother used abracadabrant on all occasions, came to her mind: “you cannot teach an old monkey to make faces.”[…]The falling building, the broken furniture, the abracadabrant arrangement of the cheap functional and the genius.

Le Figaro, not always kind to Maurice [Chevalier] in the past, called him a ‘peripatetic firework and an abracadabrant fantaisiste’.