My four-year old nephew has learned about swear words. Coaching her son about the importance of context, she tells him “words have power, don’t they?” (My sister is very smart).
Some words, of course, have more combustibility than others, but readers here no doubt can agree that their power lies in the mind of the person that uses or hears them. This assumption has not always been the case, as the word “ABRACADABRA” shows.
First recorded as a cure for malaria by the Roman physician Serenus Sammonicus in the second century, ABRACADABRA exemplifies “magical” words, ones whose power came from being uttered or written. The form pictured here was a typical way to render a talisman — in fact, for centuries it was used as a way to cure illnesses, with one idea being that as one whittled down “ABRACADABRA” letter by letter, the disease woukd disappear.
This of course did not happen, as the writer Daniel Defoe noted remorsefully in 1722 when he wrote _Journal of the Plague Year_:.
“People deceiv’d; and this was in wearing Charms, Philters, Exorcisms, Amulets, and I know not what Preparations, to fortify the Body with them against the Plague; as if the Plague was but a kind of a Possession of an evil Spirit; and that it was to be kept off with Crossings, Signs of the Zodiac, Papers tied up with so many Knots; and certain Words, or Figures written on them, as particularly the Word ABRACADABRA, form’d in Triangle, or Pyramid . . . . How the poor People found the Insufficiency of those things, and how many of them were afterwards carried away in Dead-Carts” . . . .
Source(s): @prases.org.uk/meanings/abracadabra.html. My capitalization of “Abracadabra” in the Dafoe quote. Wikipedia.
