Elongate Vowels Try elongating your vowel sounds to engender a dreamy, otherworldly quality to a word of enchantment, as described in this famous Esquire story about a game of nude croquet: "Just look at the moonlight!" He pointed through the splintered pane to the sky whose murkiness an occasional lightning flash showed without dispelling. "It'll be wonderful! We'll be like ghosts in the lightning. Nude ghosts." Noo-oo-oo-oode, she said it, lingering dreamily over the vowel of what was for her a magic word. "Nude ghosts."47 If you elongate your vowel sounds enough, you'll find yourself singing. "Imagine you are a magician of song and magic sounds," suggests Margo Anand in The Art of Everyday Ecstasy (1999). "Take a deep breath and open your mouth and throat wide. Pushing out from your belly, begin to sing." Singing magic words is quite natural, as they have traditionally been sung: "'Magic' and 'song' -- especially song like that of birds -- are concepts that are frequently expressed by the same term, or closely-related ones. For example, the Germanic word for magic formula is galdr, derived from the verb galen, 'to sing.'"48 Savor Syllables Savor the magic word as you speak or sing it,49 as you might savor a morsel of fine chocolate. In this vein, Mort Rosenblum writes about the very term chocolate, giving an exquisite taste of the nearly-tangible properties of a rich, potent word: Sometimes she would whisper it, like a magic word, as if by saying, she could taste it. It was a word of consonants, a collision of hard and soft sounds. She would utter them slowly, savoring even the tiny silence between the two syllables, and the almost inaudible t. Chocolate. 0 47 Leslie A. Fiedler, "Nude Croquet" (1957), Lust, Violence, Sin, Magic: Sixty Years of Esquire Fiction 48 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism (1951) 49 "They were practicing, tasting the magic words in their mouths." -- Deborah J. Archer, "At Fourteen," Love Shook My Heart 2 (2001). "She said the magic words to herself, out loud, several times, until, tasted and savored and swallowed, she had them by heart." -- George P. Garrett, The Magic Striptease (1964). "[S]imply to utter that magical word, to savour it on the tongue." -- Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (1981) 50 Mort Rosenblum, Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light (2005)