Dark composure

A new Microsoft product is called Lumia.  There is something Dark Ages about corporate uses of fake or dog-Latin to name their products.  Inevitably the tense, gender, spelling, part of speech or usage is wrong, sometimes all of these.  Lumia isn't Latin and Google Translate identifies it as a word in only one language:  Indonesian.  Of course they could have chosen Lumen, Latin for "light," but maybe they didn't think to look it up.  At some point in those ages the formula for the transubstantiation of the host into the body of Christ -- "Hoc est enim corpus meum" -- which the congregation heard whispered by the priest became "hocus pocus" with some muttered additions.
Wikipedia offers this delightful quote:  "I will speak of one man... that went about in King James his time... who called himself, The Kings Majesties most excellent Hocus Pocus, and so was he called, because that at the playing of every Trick, he used to say, Hocus pocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter jubeo, a dark composure of words, to blinde the eyes of the beholders, to make his Trick pass the more currently without discovery, because when the eye and the ear of the beholder are both earnestly busied, the Trick is not so easily discovered, nor the Imposture discerned."— Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark, 1656
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Published on November 18, 2014 04:41
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