“While on faculty at a writer's conterence recently, I attended a talk by another teacher who claimed that the magical incantation abracadabra, made familiar by cartoons and magician parodies, means, at root, "what is spoken is what becomes." While this is certainly a happy thought for writers looking to justify the significance of our word-work, it seemed too good to be true. Yet when I dug into etymological sources and consulted classical language scholars, I found it to be credi-ble. Abracadabra is from the Hebrew-Aramaic lineage, murky but traceable. What we say is what we bring into being. The way we speak shapes our perceptions, our actions, and ultimately the outcomes we seek.

The association of language with enchantment is an ancient one. "Chant" is from the Old Northern French cant— a sacred singing that (with en-) allows transformation. The word grammar that frames our language use inspired the word glamour to describe occult power; for the illiterate in medieval times, the anguage of those who could read and write was magic indeed.

Language lives and evolves in many of the same ways that organisms do: by mutation (when a random genetic change catches on); by geographical isolation (as when animals or plant seeds cross water, do not interact with their mainland counterparts for some generations, and become biologically distinct and endemic to their place); and by practical usefulness (in a neo-Lamarckian fashion). Tracing the etymological evolution of a word can lead to understanding its meaning with surprising new depth. A word is as alive as a bird.”

—Lyanda Lynn Haupt

(From her book titled “Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit”)

———-

Perhaps what Lyanda describes above is why many cultures that passed on their wisdom, history, medicinal knowledge, ecological awareness and poetry through predominantly oral traditions saw stories as sentient beings that have their own spirit.