4 4 MAGIC WORDS
• Wam bam alakazam
-- Penn Jillette and Teller, Penn & Teller's How to Play in Traffic (1997)
• Wham-zam, alakazam
-- Matthew Kinne, FirstFiction.net (2004)
• Zam Zam Alakazam
In Literature:
• Nancy Moser, Time Lottery (2002)
Whammy
He hit her with some kind of mind-magic hypnosis whammy,
and zoned her out entirely.
-- Jim Butcher, Blood Rites (2004)
Meanings:
• Catch, deception, string attached
"And here's the real whammy . . ." -- Elizabeth Warren, All Your Worth
(2005)
• Enchanting
"Yeah, she's really spiritual. You know how she looks at you with those
whammy eyes. There is definitely something greater than we are, oh
golly, there's a much greater power out there." -- Stephen Goodwin, Breaking
Her Fall (200 )
• Evil eye, jinx
"What happened? Senna put the whammy on David? Cast a voodoo
spell?" -- K.A. Applegate, Land of Loss (1999)
"[W]hen they were left unhypnotized for a few days, they were afflicted
with more than the usual number of hexes and whammies and practiced all
sorts of magic to undo them." -- Bernard Malamud, The Natural (1952)
"[O]ne could very well imagine that the whammies and the jinxes,
too, seeped in from the dark gap between the buildings." -- Orhan Pamuk,
The Black Book (1994)
• Flare, spark, drama
"[T]he fireworks, the whammy, the zing is what makes people chatter about
what rattled their saddles last night." -- Marc Kelly Smith, Complete Idiot's
Guide to Slam Poetry (2004)
• Impact
This sense of the word is often intensified: "double-whammy," "triple
whammy."
• Magic spell
"[W]ith the right magic whammy, he wouldn't need any aliases." -- John
Passarella, Monolith (2004)