I was teaching my 7-year-old grandson a magic trick the other day and told him that the magic word to say when you do the trick is ‘abracadabra.’
It’s certainly the sound that’s been uttered by amateur magicians for many years now—but where does it come from?
And what does it mean?
Tracking it down through my trusted Oxford English Dictionary I find that no one really knows the answer.
They say it comes from ‘post-classical Latin’—but it never had any real meaning, it has only ever (from the very beginning) been used as a magical word.
One suggestion is that it was never real Latin—only a bunch of sounds put together by semi-literate conjurers and con-men to fool the peasants into thinking they knew clever Latin words.
Back in the days when people believed magic spells could work (and before there was much in the way of medical science to help with illnesses, aches and pains) this word ‘abracadabra’ was used as a spell to make an illness slowly diminish over time.
They would write this word on a small piece of parchment which you would then wear in an amulet strung around your neck.
And the word ‘abracadabra’ was written in a particular way to suggest something shrinking or diminishing.
It was written like this:
ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACADA
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRAC
ABRA
ABR
AB
A
You can see the idea—whatever the spell was applied to would shrink or diminish just as the word did on the little piece of parchment.
(It seems unlikely they ever ran double-blind tests to check its efficacy, or that it was ever approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration for supply under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme!)
Of course, it was always a bunch of twaddle.
And Daniel Defoe in his book A Journal of the Plague Year (1665) writes about ‘the hellish charms and trumpery’ hanging around people’s necks—and he specifically mentions ‘abracadabra.’
I think he nailed it!
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