Short for 'hocus-pocus,' meaningless words used to create a magical effect or to distract; trickery or deception.
From 'hocus-pocus,' likely a 17th-century magician's nonsense phrase, possibly derived from Latin 'hoc est corpus' (this is body) from the Eucharist, or simply invented gibberish.
Stage magicians in the 1600s probably chanted 'hocus-pocus' to distract audiences during tricks—it was so effective that we still use the phrase to mean any deceptive sleight-of-hand.
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