For the hocus-pocussers, choice between alternative analyses was a matter of mere personal taste and certainly not of correct versus incorrect; there was no ‘right answer’, so it was pointless to worry about cases such as the one cited.[…]One suspects that the hocus-pocussers may have been happy enough to regard linguistic descriptions as true so long as the descriptive techniques worked unproblematically, and that they simply held the hocus-pocus position in reserve to be used if they encountered an impasse such as the Chinese case described above.

Bye, baby Bunting, / Father's gone a-hunting, / Mother's gone a-milking, / Sister's gone a-silking, / Brother's gone to buy a skin / To wrap the baby Bunting in.

It--it belongs in our family, said Button-Bright, beginning to eat and speaking between bites. This umbrella has been in our family years, an' years, an' years. But it was tucked away up in our attic an' no one ever used it 'cause it wasn't pretty. Don't blame 'em much, remarked Cap'n Bill, gazing at it curiously. It's a pretty old-lookin' bumbershoot.

So you want to see the show? You really don't have to be a ho.