Words Are Power: From Abracadabra to AI Prompts | Segue
Back to JournalIn the third century, Quintus Serenus Sammonicus prescribed a word. His Liber Medicinalis instructed readers to write abracadabra in a diminishing triangle, hang it around the neck, and wear it against a recurrent fever, probably malaria ( CDC, Emerging Infectious Diseases). Not the word as advice or prayer. The word, taken as a dose.
ABRACADABRA<br>ABRACADABR<br>ABRACADAB<br>ABRACADA<br>ABRACAD<br>ABRACA<br>ABRAC<br>ABRA<br>ABR<br>AB<br>Liber Medicinalis, 3rd century — the word, taken as a doseThe popular gloss “I create as I speak” is too perfect to be trusted. The word's origin remains disputed; proposed Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin derivations are theories, not settled history. What the surviving text establishes is narrower and stranger: one medical text treated a written word as medicine.<br>To an observer, a spell is sound. To its practitioner, it is a sequence: words chosen, ordered, and delivered under rules. But sequence never acts alone. A wedding vow, a judge's sentence, and a password work because the right system receives them in the right circumstances and their effect can be recognized. The modern version of those conditions is a model, a context, and a test. We will return to all three.<br>English preserves several revealing links between learning and enchantment. The links are real. The neat story often told about them is not always so tidy.
incantationLatin incantare — to sing spells over
Grammar, grimoire, glamour: related histories<br>The dictionary evidence is better than the candlelit folklore. French grimoire is an alteration of Old French gramaire, which could refer to grammar, a learned work, or a book of witchcraft ( Merriam-Webster). In early eighteenth-century Scots, a form of grammar became glamour, meaning a magic spell or enchantment ( Merriam-Webster's word history). Modern glamour — allure, polish, celebrity — came later.
grimoirean alteration of French grammaire
glamourScots glamer — enchantment
Power gathers around the person who can make the finer distinction.
Etymology does not prove a theory of language. It preserves a social intuition: learning lets one person see and do what another cannot yet name.<br>Two histories hiding inside “spell”<br>Modern English makes spell look like one word with a magical double life. It is actually several homographs. The noun behind a magic spell descends directly from Old English spel, meaning speech, story, or sermon; gospel preserves that older sense as “good tale” or good news. The verb meaning to name letters reached Middle English by a different route, through Anglo-French espeller. The two senses converged in modern English, although their deeper Germanic histories may be related ( Merriam-Webster's history of spell). Their meeting still feels exact: in both spelling and spell-casting, sequence carries the consequence. Get it wrong and the charm fails. Ask any programmer.<br>Invoke, conjure, enchant: the programmer's séance<br>To invoke a function is standard technical English. The verb came through Latin invocare, “to call upon,” and still also means to appeal to an authority or put something into operation ( Merriam-Webster). Conjure followed a different path, from Latin conjurare, to join in taking an oath, toward summoning by incantation ( Merriam-Webster). Developers use it informally when a command seems to produce a whole environment at once. The vocabulary makes software sound like a séance: exact words entered, distant machinery stirred. The joke became an interface.
invocationinvocare — to call upon
conjureconjurare — to swear together
The power of the true name<br>The true name is a recurring device rather than one universal rule of magic. Rumpelstiltskin loses his leverage when his name is discovered; Ursula K. Le Guin makes knowledge of true names central to Earthsea's fictional magic. The pattern works because a name can turn an unknown thing into a particular one. Prompting inherits that practical advantage. Asking for “that painting style with the dramatic light” is ambiguous; naming tenebrism supplies a recognized concept for a model to interpret. One term replaces a gesture with a distinction.
true namepower through naming in myth and fiction
When a word is a weapon<br>Words have also served as checkpoints. In Judges 12, Gileadite guards at the Jordan fords make suspected Ephraimite fugitives say shibboleth; the pronunciation sibboleth identifies them for execution. The passage reports 42,000 Ephraimites dead in the conflict, not 42,000 individually documented pronunciation tests ( Judges 12:4-6). Shibbolethnow names a word or custom that distinguishes insiders from outsiders. It is also the essay's darkest verification test: a word spoken into a system, measured against a standard, with consequences determined by the result. Long before software, language was already serving as a checkpoint.<br>Words that do things<br>In his 1955 William James Lectures, J. L. Austin examined utterances that...