Magic Words

As a kid, I loved watching “You Bet Your Life”, an offbeat quiz show starring Groucho Marx and a duck that descended with $50 in its bill when someone said the designated “secret word” each episode. Like many nerdy youngsters, I went through a “Magic Made Simple” phase, but never got the tricks right. Still, I loved the sound of the magic words Abracadabra and Hocus Pocus, even when they didn’t change the dachshund into a dragon or when they were sung by the Steve Miller Band, Lady Gaga, or Bette Midler.

Little did I know until much later when I descended a rabbit hole into the mysterious realm of etymology, the arcane world of the origin of words, that those words weren’t based on nonsense syllables like Bibbidi, Bobbiti, Boo (thanks Walt Disney) and Alakazam that appeared in the 20th century. Hocus Pocus is likely derived from a 17th century protestant mockery of the Roman Catholic words of consecration (“hoc est corpus” in Latin) or may come from an invocation of a folkloric Norse magician Ochus Bochus. Abracadabra is even more ancient, dating back to a second century, and much more complicated. Etymologies based on Aramaic and Hebrew sacred phrases abound, but none is convincing. There is a lot of evidence that the word was used as a triangular healing talisman in the middle ages to repel fevers, malaria, and even the black death, to little effect. This use points toward the deception of magic, that implies we can force the Divine Hand if we just have the right words of power at our disposal.

Actually, the lore of grandmothers is much more useful here. They (and their daughters too) teach us early on the only two magic words we need to survive life. Simply, Please and Thanks. I suspect that Mother Mary and St. Anne drilled them into little Jesus as a boy.

When the Lord’s prayer came up in the daily readings at mass recently, it occurred to me that the fundamental prayer of our faith is nothing other than a short “thanks” (hallowed by your name, let your will be done) followed by a long chain of petition: please give us each day our daily bread, please forgive us even as we try forgive each other, please don’t try us beyond our strength, please keep us, and those we love, save. Please and thanks. Thanks and please. Plenty of enough magic there, without the duck with the secret word or the talismanic abracadabra.

Blessings,