Magic Words, Word Magic
English has a funny way of weaving its spell over us.
Native speakers and newcomers alike struggle with the seeming insanity of the ways in which the English language refuses to submit to any single logical system of spelling rules. We can discover millenia of linguistic clues to the complex history of successive conquests—each importing new language rules to the dominant language spoken in the land to become known as England and, after England’s own history of conquering, to the lands where English later took hold.
Verb or Noun?
And if we dig deeper, we find that the ambiguous nature of English spelling is itself further complicated by the ambiguous meanings of the word “spell” as it appears in different contexts.
On page 133 of his magical book Spell of the Sensuous, which I used as the basis of my writing course curriculum for over a decade, the author David Abram writes:
As the roman alphabet spread through oral Europe, the Old English word “spell,” which had meant simply to recite a story or tale, took on the new double meaning: on the one hand, it now meant to arrange, in the proper order, the written letters that constitute the name of a thing or a person; on the other, it signified a magic formula or charm.
Part of the difference between spelling as a proper conventional arrangement of letters and spelling as submitting someone or something to the influence of spoken magic lies in the different grammatical functions of the two: “spell” as a verb versus “spell” as a noun. “Be sure to spell the words correctly when writing down the instructions for casting a spell!” We move from the infinitive to the noun, from to spell to cast a spell. This feature in English where nouns become verbs and verbs become nouns can spell confusion for all of us!
Spelling as Word Magic
And part of the confusion—con-fusion, fusing things together in such a way as to undo any clear distinctions between them—lies in the historical fact that the spelling of words originally seemed to be magic itself. As Abram, explains:
For to assemble the letters that make up the name of a thing, in the correct order, was precisely to effect a magic, to establish a new kind of influence over that entity, to summon it forth! To spell, to correctly arrange the letters to form a name or a phrase, seemed thus at the same time to cast a spell, to exert a new and lasting power over the things spelled.
If we sit down for a spell and look deeper into all of this confusion, we can find things that complicate this distinction between the spelling of words and the casting of spells.
A spell can be a period of time, as in my clause above—“If we sit down for a spell . . .”
A spell can be an act of substitution—“Could you spell me for a bit while I go get lunch?”
To spell out can be a way of clarifying steps in a sequence or details in an explanation.
There are times when it is important to spell out these differences.
And yet, as Abram suggests, our attention to the alphabetic nature of language—English and otherwise—involved casting a spell on ourselves:
Yet we can now realize that to learn to spell was also, and more profoundly, to step under the influence of the written letters ourselves, to cast a spell upon our own senses. It was to exchange the wild and multiplicitous magic of an intelligent natural world for the more concentrated and refined magic of the written word.
Such a move spells danger as we grow ever more separated from the world of nature around us.
