And yet sometimes, fortuitously thrown into disarray by the unexpected, we find we can bring these ghostly implements from their living death and bestow purpose and a fleeting value to their arcane use.
Just as the junior senator from Massachusetts used to say, for arcane fund-raising purposes, that he was only the "presumptive" nominee, so he was earlier the "presumptive" or last-resort choice once all the passion and spontaneity had been threshed out by the party machine.
At first, the trip's purpose seemed arcane to me: Raymo would study sea level during the geologic period called the Pliocene.
Don't use arcane attacks when someone has an Arcane Tower on them.
And so the whole show looks not just arcane but also trivial on purpose, like a game of dressing-up-in-costume charades that has gotten out of hand.
Jets and junkets can be visualized, as can bonuses, if only as pallets of cash in a Swiss bank vault, and so they make better targets for popular resentment and politicians' umbrage than some more arcane allotment mechanisms, like special-purpose vehicles and side pockets.
In January 1972, I came to the state to cover its presidential caucuses, an oddball system of simultaneous meetings devised to test the candidates' strength, similar in purpose to but far more arcane than the primaries most states use.
The purpose of acquiring this arcane knowledge is not to beat the game, but to continue the game, to build new things.
"Now everybody is talking about the electoral college it's unfair, arcane, and no longer serves a purpose.
"I think it is very important for judges to be part of the real world and to appear in public for educative purposes to help explain the arcane mysteries of the court to the general public," said William G. Ross, a judicial ethics professor at Samford University's Cumberland School of Law.
