Someone wrote to identify the day’s “magic word” and I wondered what made the word “magic.” I was told that the word had balance: consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel . . . the eight-letter word had been born magical.
My son once said to me, “I can remember when all those letters suddenly started to make sense, and I could read the words.” That was an astonishing revelation to me; I had no similar memory. I cannot remember not being able to read. I don’t know when I learned and who taught me, but in my childhood I spent long weekend days at Carnegie Library with my sister and brother. My cousin, who attended grade school with me, told me that my teachers picked me to read the stories I had written. I do not remember that. But words have always been magic to me.
My mother was apparently listening as my sister and I discussed how and why we got to be readers: we had no memory of anyone reading to us, which is how most children develop a passion for reading. My sister is a producer for television who “writes for a living,” as she told me, once. We wondered aloud why we had become such avid readers, and my mother raised her head and said, “Escape,” and returned to her activity. We sat stunned and open-mouthed as we processed an acknowledgement of the fear-blasted life we had remembered. My sister also told me that for many of our young years, she had a large store of words in her head that she did not know how to pronounce. “I knew the words because I had read them, but I did not know how they sounded until I heard them spoken.”
My son wrote a song and introduced me to a new word: cafuné. The online Urban Dictionary defines it as “the act of running your fingers through your lover’s hair,” and notes that it is one of the words that have no direct English translation. My eldest daughter, ever on the hunt for a word I cannot define, introduced me to “logomachy,” which is defined as “an argument about words.”
I worked with a man who had the temerity to challenge me on the spelling and definition of a word. The man was a graduate of the University of Kentucky, and when I met him, a job recruiter for an electrical contractor involved in the building of the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Southern Indiana. I was an artist who produced charts and graphs, a newsletter, and occasionally, assisted a technical writer. In a casual conversation, the recruiter used a word that I had not heard; I asked him what it meant. He defined the term, and I asked him to find it in the dictionary. He fumbled through the “Fs” and could not. I went to “P,” and showed him.
“Phlegm? You mean ‘fleem’ is not a word?” Of course, every word spoken becomes “a word,” though it may not have universal acceptance. In Black Gnat, Ky., “fleem” is commonly accepted, and I was introduced to that magic word in the 1980s.
I love the idea of “magic words”; I can still hear a word and think, “Ooo! What a great word.” In the little book “A Child’s Christmas In Wales,” Dylan Thomas described the snow as “shawling,” a magical description of a magical time. An incredible combination of words in Steinbeck’s East Of Eden made me gasp and put down the book so that I could breathe in the moment. For me, words become magical when they enter us and unlock our joy.