‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves
—Jabberwocky – Lewis Carroll
did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogroves
and the mome raths outgrebe.
Language is a defining mark of humanity. Chimpanzees and bonobos use tools. Ants and bees build communities. But speaking is the one trait that separates us from the rest of the terrestrial animals on the planet.1 The ability of cetacen species like dolphins and whales to communicate linguistically is still a much debated topic. Whether their keening songs represent a language or are simply instinctive vocalizations remains unknown. For perspective, I recommend you read Roger Zelazny’s My Name is Legion. While the work is science fiction, one of the stories in the anthology poses an interesting idea about species communication.
Language has allowed us to rise to the point where we can manipulate the planet in ways unimaginable. We transmit our memory and our understanding from generation to generation through the spoken and written word. This innovation enables us to reach back thousands of years into the collective human experience. Without language, these memories would disappear, as Bladerunner’s Roy Batty puts it, like tears in rain.
Yet we waste this vital resource constantly, talking about the weather, nattering about the latest celebrity scandal, or arguing over politics on social media. We spend it away without thought or appreciation, without any idea of how important it is.
If you’ve been following this site for a while, you already know that I refuse to write to a fifth grade reading level. I think the vast majority of people who are interested in the kinds of strange things I write about are generally more intelligent than that. So give yourself a pat on the back if you don’t care for the fine art of small talk.
The place where I come from
—Big Time – Peter Gabriel
is a small town
They think so small;
They use small words.
It’s a sad fact that sometimes just the possession of a large vocabulary has marked some for derision, isolation, and harassment by the general population. “Nerd”, “brainiac”, and even “professor” were meant as hurtful and derogatory in my youth and I am sure my experience is not singular. The root of this, of course, is that if one does not understand the words I am using, it tends to make them feel like they might not be so bright. No one likes to feel dumb, so why not respond with hurtful bullying. Brute force, verbally or otherwise, is far easier than looking things up in the dictionary.
I did, and still do, follow that latter route. Words are a fascination to me, and if I discover a new word I will delve deep until I ascertain it’s meaning. When I was in elementary school a millennia ago, we were taught how words were formed. We explored the entire dictionary entry of a word, including it’s origins in Aulde Anglish Old French, Latin, Greek, and a few that were more exotic. From this practice I could begin to construct words, and to greet new words with familiar endings and openings ( called suffixes and prefixes officially) with some knowledge of what they were about. This is vastly helpful in learning new and complex things.
The Hebrew Torah and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet are believed by Kabbalists to hold the secrets of the Cosmos. Indeed, the letters are believed to be capable of making reality all by themselves. One can find this in the cautionary tale of the Golem, a man of clay who was inscribed with the word “Truth”. When the creature began doing damage, the letter Aleph was rubbed out, changing the word to “Dead”. While this may not strictly be Kabbalistic magic, the folklore partakes of the idea of the power of the letters as archetypes of the energies of creation.
Many ancient cultures had similar beliefs. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that showed snakes, scorpions, or other baneful creatures were often “killed” by being incomplete or broken, so as to prevent the creature “coming to life” and doing magical harm.
Photo by Dana Ward on Unsplash
For instance. logos, from the Greek, is the basis of the suffix -ology. The -ology suffix generally is taken to mean “the scientific study of”. So you could take a word, and add -ology to the end, and you made a new word that was the scientific study of whatever that root word was.
My youngest collects a series of books that begin publishing in their childhood using this principle. The first, I believe, was printed in England, and called Dragonology. It was followed shortly by Egyptology (ironically, actually the scientific study of Ancient Egypt), and the race was on.
Now, those of us who spent far too many hours of our youth perusing the entries in the great big Webster’s dictionary at the library (I now own four) are quick to point out that the scientific study of dragons is more properly Draconology, or possibly Dracology, because the word dragon comes from Old French, that borrowed if from the Latin Draconem (or draco) who stole it from the Greek drakon, which was a sea serpent, and not a dragon at all.
However, these beasts were also known by the term Vermis, from which comes our modern English Worm (after taking a trip through Germany and France, of course). Vermis was applicable to snakes which the ancients did not separate from worms of the more earthly sort. This is why cadaver art and dans macabre images frequently show serpents entwined and emerging from corpses. So when you find translation of Aulde Anglish sagas about slaying dragons where they call it “an old worm” you now know how that happens.
We also get our modern word vermin from the root vermis, and this has broadened to a generic class of undesired pests and parasites. In the dialect of my Appalachian homeland and the various child dialects of the American West, the word has become “varmint”. If you are unfamiliar with the term, I recommend reviewing the Bugs Bunny/Yosemite Sam Warner cartoons, where Sam drops it about every three seconds.
In my herbals, I find the word frequently attached to the suffix -fuge. This ending derives from the Latin fugus – to fly, or put to flight. Thus a vermifuge, is an herb or compound that drives worms from the digestive tract. I’m not sure it would deter a dragon, though, unless you planted an awful lot of it.
The vermifuge always gets me thinking of febrifuge, which is an herb or compound that gets rid of fevers (febris – Latin: fever). And so on and so forth. In this way I learned herbology. Herbology is the scientific study of herbal medicine, as opposed to botany, which is a generic subset of biology that focuses on the scientific study of plants.
Botany is one of those words that defy the structure we rely on. It comes from the ancient Greek botane, which is basically “plant”. Now why should the study of plants not be called botanology? I have no answer for you. Perhaps the Greeks used that word, but the French didn’t, and we English speakers stole the French word.
One of the other words that “break” our neat system is astronomy. Astronomy is the scientific study of stars (from the Greek astronimos – literally “star-arranging”). Astronomy and astrology were once the same thing. It was the same thing when the Greeks used astronomy, and when the Romans borrowed both words. It was only in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance that the two started to divide. Astrology went forward as a means of viewing the star arrangements as indicative of events in the world, and astronomy evolved to mean studying the mechanisms where these star arrangements came to be.
It’s interesting that the seminal texts of both sciences were written by the same person, Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria. I’ve mentioned him before and with reason.
Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos (tetra – Greek: four / biblos – Greek: book) is the basis of Western astrology as we know it today. He was consolidating and editing the various texts from the Library of Alexandria, some of which went back to original sources in ancient Babylon, Chaldea, and Akkad. And those were probably based on Sumerian and older traditions, possibly, going back to the earliest human impressions of the night sky. This is just one example of how language can transcend our long long tenure on the planet.
On the other hand, Ptolemy’s book on astronomy, called now the Almagest (an Arabic corruption of the Greek megiste: greatest) was instrumental in suppressing things like the idea of a spherical earth that orbited with other planets around the sun.
The original name in Greek was Mathematike Syntaxis is a bit more accurate, and terribly similar to the Principia Mathematica of Sir Isaac Newton which ultimately replaced it as the “correct” explanation of planetary motion.
The Almagest asserted that the earth was a more or less flat and finite object in the middle of the universe, the Center of All Creation, with the Sun, the Moon, the Planets, the Stars, the Orders of the Angels, and God Almighty in His Heaven circling above (in roughly that order).
As this model was amenable to both Medieval Christianity and Islam, it was given support over other radical ideas like that of Aristarchus who had proven the earth was round, and calculated it’s size very accurately around the same time as Ptolemy was editing these works.
With the Renaissance and discovery of sea routes to Asia and then the Americas, the Almagest became a volume of quaint and curious lore to be found in the libraries of esotericists, collectors, and cranks (I have a pdf copy from here.) The Americas, were named by the Italian cartographer who drew up the first charts for Christopher Columbus. He was called Amerigo Vespucci and was happy to name an entire hemisphere after himself. That may not have been his actual intention, but other swathes of Terra Incognita ( Latin: Land Unknown) kept the names as the maps expanded and they became Terra Cognita. Personally I prefer those spaces on the edge, past Terra Incognita, with the admonishment: Hic sunt dracones!
“Here there be dragons!”
And just like that, I’ve circled back around. And this is theme of this week’s article. Our mastery of words, and the capacity we have to manipulate them gives up power in the universe. The words we use mark us out among others. The way we use words gives us the power over others. We can lead. We can wound. We can poison. We can heal. We can inspire.
The importance of the word and language is buried deep in our human history. It is that oldest form of sympathetic magic. The name of a thing is the thing. That is the same as the image of the thing. If you know the name, you can affect the thing.
And by this you can name things for which there isn’t an image, like the wind, or a spirit. You can call upon the slyphs of the breeze, and the angry heart of the hurakan (native Taino name for “evil wind spirit” from whence comes “hurricane”). You can anthropomorphize the seasons and the days and such things to make it easier to communicate with them. We can speak to the genius loci (genius – Latin: attendant or guardian spirit / loci – Latin: place) and ask permission or at least detente (French from Latin: to relax or loosen) when we perform our rituals. In doing so, we may teach them the words to lend their voices to the process, and we may learn some words from them.
I started out with Lewis Carroll because I have always loved the linguistic twisting of that poem. There’s a lot of magic hidden in Lewis Carroll, though I am not sure if he even knew it. A little girl follows a person sized, waistcoat-wearing rabbit down a hole in a hedge. Such a creature is called a Púca in Welsh tradition. It is a mischievous spirit related to the Fae. Certainly Alice’s trip into the earth is not so different than many other Celtic tales of visiting the world of the Tuatha De Danann. Alice returns to the Wonderland by passing through to the other side of the mirror. These are all found in folklore tales about witchcraft and faeries. It is perhaps why his works are so frequently classed with the tales of the Brothers Grimm.
But what he does with Jabberwocky is simply marvelous. He takes an algebraic approach to words. That is, if one follows the proper order of operations – in this case, English grammar, any n can be inserted into the formula and the equation still solved.
“‘Twas brilliant and the slimy toads
did gyre and gambol in the wave.”
This “translation” as it were is something I discovered in a literature treatise some years ago, but the lesson is profound. Words can be changed at will and if you still follow the rules of grammar the statement is readable. Here, in a poem it also needs to rhyme, which is easier if you can make up the word, especially if oranges are involved.
But the fact that it is a poem gives us a clue that “outgrebe” is pronounced with the last syllable as “A” rather than “E” in order to rhyme with “wabe”.
Unless of course, those words have an additional syllable and are pronounced out – gre – bE and wa – bE, which is perfectly possible. In this case the final -bE rhymes. 2 Any good poet will tell you, having the same sound rhyme is lazy writing, so I’m going with wAbe and outgrAbe. The ghost of Lewis Carroll can sue me if I’m wrong.
Does all this linguistic and grammatic gymnastic make your head hurt? Try reading a Medieval grimoire sometime. The tenets of Qabbalah have evolved from the practice of rearranging Hebrew letters to make new words, and then contemplating those words to discover hidden truths. Angelic magic is full of words and symbols that twist and turn. The famous Sator magic square reads the same up and down and left to right; and right to left bottom to top.
In this flexibility and agility with language and writing we can find a metaphor for the fluidity of reality itself. Even in modern quantum science, the observation of a phenomena is considered the cause of it’s existence. In quantum terms, every particle is moving at an unknown speed through an unknown point in space. It is only when we seek to measure it’s location or speed that it really is there. Add to that, the uncertainty principle, – a concept that says we can either know where it is at any point, or how fast it is moving at any point, but never both, and you start dancing through the hedge after that rabbit.
In this flaky quantum multiverse (yes, since the particle can be anywhere at any time until someone somewhere sees it, the “other” places and times can be seen by other someones in other somewheres and make other universes) tiny tiny little particles act freaky all the time. But as they lump together and get bigger and bigger and turn into protons and neutrons and electrons and atoms and molecules and cruise ships and nebulae and galaxies they start to behave more in line with Mr. Newton’s rules in the Principia. There are some important modifications from Mr. Einstein’s Relativity (General and Special) and much more work done since then, but essentially the bigger it gets, the harder it becomes to influence it. At least when you are bound by those pesky laws of physics in normal space-time.
But the mind is not bound by that. Science really can’t determine if the mind is even part of that. The mind can travel back into our past, replay events, re-see and re-hear experiences that were a long time ago. We can hear music. We can remember speech. Though these events once had a physicality they are now stored in a form that is not physical, in a much more confined space (if we accept that the mind and brain are co-resident), and capable of immediate recollection.
But the mind can also experience things that were never real. We call it imagination, but our brains can present us with pasts we did not ever live through, futures which are yet to be, and worlds we can only dream of far across the great expanse of night. And these are equally accessible as the memories of our “real world”, perhaps even moreso.
Well, of course, but that’s “all in your head”. To make things happen in the real world you get bound by physics. I’m not sure about that.
Mozart was really good at making the music he heard in his head come out into the world. Shakespeare did the same for words, as did Carroll. Many words we use today were just invented by them (and other’s of course) to fill a need, or make a cunning rhyme.
For instance, if you’ve ever found something so funny it made you chortle, you owe it to Lewis Carroll. He made up the word “chortled” in Jabberwocky, though others deconstructed it to be a contraction of “chuckled” and “snorted”. As Jabberwocky employs a number of onomatopoeia – words that are made up to represent a sound – like galumphing, burbling, and whiffling, chortling is likely meant to represent a deep rumbling laugh, rather than the laugh-snort that sends your coffee across your phone screen. 3Again, the ghost of Lewis Carroll can haunt me if I err.
There’s a frequent meme that translates the word “abracadabra” as “What I say I make.” While my research indicates that “abracadabra” is probably a corruption, mispronunciation, or pun relating to the Gnostic deity named Abraxas (the X is pronounced as K) , the idea comes from a long belief in the power of the spoken word to make things happen. J.K. Rowling takes the sounds and gives them a Latinesque twist to create the Avada Kedavra death curse, working in a pun on cadaver in the process.
Abracadabra can almost always be found in close proximity to hocus-pocus (believed to be a derivation of the blessing Hoc est corpus meum). That these rhyming words make no real sense is not relevant. We like the way they sound. They are music to the ear and quicksilver on the tongue. They’re also mnemonic (Greek mnemon – mindful). A lot of spells use rhyming and poesy to make them easier to remember. Most of us, even if pressed to do so, might not be able to remember a famous speech or quotation, but we routinely sing along to hundreds, if not thousands, of performances by our favorite bands. Small wonder that our words enchantment and incantation share the Latin root “cantare” for “sing”. This is inherent in the Welsh Bard, and the Greek Chorus. They had the power to charm the spirit, even if the spirit were just sitting there in the audience in their meat suits.
Language and it’s use to charm and enspell is a fascinating and potentially endless subject of examination. I have gone on much longer here than many of my other articles. If you have had the stamina and resolve to reach here to the end, I greatly appreciate it. For the TL;DR version, words are cool, and you can make things happen with them. Especially when you make them from scratch.
Please join me again next week, where I cannot promise to be less loquacious (loqui Latin talk), but will at least remove the parentheticals.
SirJohn Tenniel’s woodcut of the Jabberwock from Alice Through the Looking Glass is public domain. The still from Hocus-Pocus Hare is copyrighted by Time-Warner, and is employed under the Fair Use doctrine. The header image was provided by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash. The thumbnail image for social media was provided by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash. Unsplash is a free resource for bloggers and artists when photographers offer royalty free content for use.