MAGIC WORDS
earliest ancestors) that one's commands and actions are mysteriously bound
together into what Arthur Koestler calls "an almost indivisible unity"17 -- notwithstanding
the claim of Shakespearean spell-casters that they are engaging
in a "deed without a name."18 Every audience brings its own emotional
component to this mystery. "That same feeling of awe is still manifest in
children's eyes when they listen to a magician's abracadabra."19 This sort of
emotion is priceless to the art of conjuring: "Sartre used the word 'magic' to
describe the way in which . . . emotions completely overrule logic, until the
world is seen through a sort of distorting mirror." 0
Manipulating the audience through language, the magician can do
even more than distort logic and obscure reality: he can "replace it altogether."
21 He accomplishes some of this with ordinary language, complementing
his legerdemain with a patter calculated to shape our perceptions and
expectations, misdirect our attention, and obfuscate our sensory cues. But
at the critical moment, it is not ordinary language on which the magician
traditionally relies.
It is the intention of this dictionary to showcase those powerful
words that give shape and form to a magician's ungraspable feats, much like
his piece of silk, or that construct a puzzling new reality, like his landscape of
smoke and mirrors. Whether you are a professional illusionist, an amateur at
sleight-of-hand, or simply a word lover intrigued by the power of language,
may this dictionary enlighten and inspire you to create pure wonder and awe
whenever you speak. Voilà!
Hocus Pocus Is No "Mumbo Jumbo"
Magic words may be even more meaningful than ordinary ones.
-- Tore Janson, A Natural History of Latin (2004)
The root of the word "grammar" is "grimoire" . . . Language is
a book of spells.
-- William A. Covino, Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy (1994)
Magic words, to use the colorful phraseology of diarist Anaïs Nin, are like fugitives
from a subtle world of fairy tales and dreams, "beyond the law of gravity
[and] chaos." They comprise a mysterious language "which is shadowy
and full of reverberations" and deep in meaning. They catch the essence of
"what we pursue in the night dream, and which eludes us, the incident which
17 The Act of Creation (1964)
18 Macbeth, IV.i.49
19 Marcel Danesi, Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things: An Introduction
to Semiotics (1999)
20 Colin Wilson, The Mammoth Book of True Crime (197 )
21 Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections (1988)
