Magical Phrases

If I asked you to say something "magical," what would you say?  Hocus pocus? Abracadabra? Open sesame? I heard all of those phrases as a child and used them in my make-believe childhood world. Do they hold any power? I doubt that they do, but they have a long history of use in "real" magical ceremonies and also in theatrical magic shows.

Let's look at the origins of those magical phrases.

Hocus-pocus is a generic term that may be derived from an ancient language and is currently used to refer to the actions of magicians, often as the stereotypical magic words spoken when bringing about some sort of change. It was once a common term for a magician, juggler, or other similar entertainers.

The earliest known English-language book on magic (known then as legerdemain "sleight of hand"), was published in 1635 as Hocus Pocus Junior: The Anatomie of Legerdemain.

"Hocus Pocus" also was the stage name of a well-known magician of that time, William Vincent, who may have been the author. He is recorded as having been granted a license to perform magic in England in 1619. 

But it is unlikely that Vincent invented the phrase and the origins of the term remain obscure. I found a bunch of conjectures. Some say it a garbled Latin religious phrase or some form of "dog" "pig" Latin. 

In searching other languages, we find in some Slavic languages, "pokus" means an "attempt" or an "experiment." There is a tenuous connection with alchemy going back to the court of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor (1552 – 1612). I  saw that hocus may mean "to cheat" in Latin or a distorted form of the word hoc meaning "this." Together they would give the sense of attempting to cheat.

Another theory (in the Oxford English Dictionary) has the origin from hax pax max Deus adimax, a pseudo-Latin phrase used as a magical formula by conjurors. A similar distortion theory is that it may be taken from the Catholic liturgy of the Eucharist, which contains the phrase “Hoc est enim corpus meum”  (meaning "This is my body") particularly the hoc est corpus portion. This is a mocking suggestion that a magician is changing something in the same way that the Catholic Eucharist changes water and wine through Transubstantiation.

The final suggested origin is that it comes from the Norse magician and "demon of the north" Ochus Bochus.

Image by Franck Barske from Pixabay

Abracadabra is an incantation used as a magic word in stage magic tricks, and historically was believed to have healing powers when inscribed on an amulet.

Abracadabra's origin is also unclear but its first occurrence is in the second-century works of Serenus Sammonicus. His book called Liber Medicinalis (sometimes known as De Medicina Praecepta Saluberrima) who was a physician to the Roman emperor Caracalla. In that book, he prescribes for malaria and other lethal diseases wearing an amulet containing the word written in the form of a triangle. It is found on Abraxas stones, which were worn as amulets. Subsequently, its use spread beyond the Gnostics.

Possible folk etymologies include from Hebrew meaning "I will create as I speak", or in Aramaic "I create like the word."  There are also some similar words in Latin and Greek such as abraxas. but according to the OED Online, "no documentation has been found to support any of the various conjectures."

The Greek abraxas is a possibly related word of mystic meaning in the system of the Gnostic Basilides and appears in Gnostic texts such as the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit. It was engraved on certain antique gemstones, called on that account Abraxas stones, which were used as amulets or charms. (Their spelling on stones was "Abrasax" (Αβρασαξ) and the more modern "Abraxas" probably comes from a confusion made between the Greek letters sigma (Σ) and xi (Ξ) in the Latin transliteration. The seven letters may represent each of the seven classic planets.

In the English speaking world, abracadabra was frequently dismissed. The Puritan minister Increase Mather dismissed it as being powerless. Author Daniel Defoe wrote dismissively about Londoners who posted the word on their doorways to ward off sickness during the Great Plague of London.

Today the word is now commonly used simply as an incantation in the performance of theatrical magic.

"Open Sesame" is another common magical phrase that was found in the story of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" in Galland's version of One Thousand and One Nights. In the story, it opens the mouth of a cave in which forty thieves have hidden a treasure. 

In Antoine Galland's Les Mille et une nuits (1704–1717) it appears as "Sésame, ouvre-toi" which we translate as "Sesame, open yourself."

So, is this just a storybook phrase?

Sesame is connected to Babylonian magic practices which used sesame oil. The phrase probably derives from the sesame plant. Sesame seeds grow in a seed pod that splits open when it reaches maturity, and it is thought that it alludes to unlocking treasures.

But "sesame" is a reduplication of the Hebrew šem 'name', i.e. God or a kabbalistic word representing the Talmudic šem-šamáįm "name of heaven" so it also has religious and mystical connections. 

Though I do have a replica Professor Dumbledore elder  wand that I bought at Olivander's shop (Well, the one at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Florida), I haven't found that any of the Hogwart's spells or the magical phrases described above seem to do anything.

Maybe I need a different wand. Maybe I need to go to wizarding school. Or just stick to card tricks.

Crossposted at Weekends in Paradelle

Unicorn (finance)

One of the Unicorn Tapestries, c. 1495–1505
 (The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) Public Domain, Link

When most people think of a UNICORN, they imagine the legendary creature that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn projecting from its forehead. 

But "unicorn" also refers to many other more modern usages. One of the nhe newest comes from the world of finance.

A unicorn is a term in the business world to indicate a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion.

The term was coined in 2013 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee. He chose the name because he was equating the mythical creature with a statistical rarity of such a successful ventures.

Since then, "decacorn" has come to mean those companies over $10 billion in value and "hectocorn" is used to describe a company valued over $100 billion. 

When Lee originally coined the term, there were only 39 companies that were considered unicorns, but the rarity of unicorns has decreased as the number of them increases.

In 2018 alone, 16 U.S. companies became unicorns, resulting in 119 private companies worldwide valued at $1 billion or more. As of this writing, six out of the top ten most valuable unicorns are based in China.

Top ten largest unicorns overall.

1.     Ant Financial – China
2.     ByteDance – China
3.     DiDi – China
4.     SpaceX – USA
5.     Stripe – USA
6.     Lufax – China
7.     JUUL Labs – USA
8.     Cainiao – China
9.     Palantir Technologies – USA
10.     Kuaishou – China

Top U.S. unicorn SpaceX headquarters in December 2017
with plumes from a flight of a Falcon 9 rocket visible overhead CC0, Link

Beastie Boys

Beastie Boys, Club Citta Kawasaki, Japan, Check Your Head  tour, 1992 - via Wikimedia

The BEASTIE BOYS are another band that has played games with their name origin. Some bands (like Imagine Dragons) say their name is an anagram. Others have said their name is actually an abbreviation or acronym with each letter standing for some word.

Such is the case with BEASTIE BOYS who, according to Michael Diamond, is an acronym with BEASTIE stands for Boys Entering Anarchistic Stages Towards Internal Excellence. Of course, that means the "boys" part is repeated.

Beastie Boys were an American rap rock group from New York City, formed in 1978. The original lineup was Michael "Mike D" Diamond (vocals, drums), Adam "MCA" Yauch (vocals, bass), and Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz (vocals, guitar, programming). The band formed with members of a hardcore punk band called the Young Aborigines in 1978. When that band's bass player left and Yauch joined in, the band changed their name to Beastie Boys.

On a 2007 Charlie Rose TV show interview, both Yauch and Diamond acknowledged that the acronym, in fact, was an "afterthought", conceived after the band name was already chosen.

Yauch died from cancer at the age of 47 in 2012. In 2014, Mike D confirmed that he and Ad-Rock would not make music under the Beastie Boys name again. Founding Beastie Boys guitarist John Berry died in 2016, aged 52, as a result of frontotemporal dementia. He is usually credited with naming the band Beastie Boys just because it sounded cool. He played guitar on the first EP and the first Beastie Boys "show" took place at Berry's loft.

   

Is It Autumn or Fall?

Autumn by Dietmar Rabich (Derivative work: Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

It has felt like winter here in New Jersey for weeks although the winter solstice made it official today (December 21). As trees have lost their color and their leaves and then were hit with killing frosts and ice. As we enter winter, I asked myself today why the autumn season is sometimes called "fall." Is it just because leaves fall from trees?

The word autumn is derived from Latin autumnus, with connotations of the passing of the year. After the Greek era, the word continued to be used as the Old French word autompne (automne in modern French) or autumpne in Middle English,[18] and was later normalised to the original Latin. 

There are rare examples of its use as early as the 12th century, but by the 16th century, it was in common use. Before the 16th century, "harvest" was the term usually used to refer to the season, as it is common in other West Germanic languages to this day (cf. Dutch herfst, German Herbst and Scots hairst). 

A change occurred as the majority of people moved from working the land to living in towns. The harvest itself was removed from their daily life and came to refer more to the time of year rather than the activity of reaping crops.

The alternative word for the season,"fall," also has roots in old Germanic languages. The exact derivation is unclear. Possibilities include the Old English fiæll or feallan and the Old Norse fall. They seem like good origins but these words mean "to fall from a height" and not seasons or times of the year. 

The most likely explanation is that the term derived in 16th-century England as a contraction of Middle English expressions like "fall of the leaf" and "fall of the year".

With the peak of 17th century English emigration to the British colonies in North America, "fall" as a season was popularized though it was gradually becoming nearly obsolete in Britain.

ZZ Top

Poster from a film about the band

ZZ Top is an American rock band from Houston, Texas, formed in 1969. The group consists of founder Billy Gibbons (guitar, lead vocals), Dusty Hill (bass, vocals), and Frank Beard (drums, percussion). 

They were initially a blues band but their style evolved into a more rock style while maintaining Gibbons' blues guitar and Hill and Beard's rhythm section. 

We have 4 possible origin stories of how ZZ TOP may have gotten their name.

First is that they took their name from the names of other bluesmen. Gibbons noticed that some performers they admired used initials. Gibbons particularly liked B.B. King and Z. Z. Hill and thought of combining the two into "ZZ King."

A second popular story online is that they got their name by combining the names Zig Zag and Top, two well-known brands of "cigarette" rolling papers. This explanation is the only one that explains both parts of the name.

   

According to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 radio show, they chose the name because they wanted to be listed last alphabetically in names of bands and in record stores racks. I thought bands wanted to be listed first?

And a fourth origin story is that the ZZ is what you see in the boards of two classic American barn doors when they are closed. This seems unlikely - and the barns near me have X X on the doors.


ZZ Top - Greatest Hits
Tres Hombres
Rancho Texicano: The Very Best of ZZ Top

The Complete Studio Albums (10CDs) 
Double Down Live DVD
Fandango!
ZZ Top's First Album
Rio Grande Mud
ZZ Top: Live from Texas [Blu-ray DVD] 
Afterburner
The Best of ZZ Top: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of the Guitar Styles and Techniques of Billy Gibbons (Signature Licks Guitar)

   

pen and pencil

Montblanc Marc Newson Ballpoint Pen

I would have guessed that "pen" and "pencil" would have the same origin story, but they do not.

PEN goes back to the late 13th century as penne and was a writing implement made from the hard, hollow stem at the base of a feather. In Old French pene was a quill pen or feather which goes back to the Latin penna "a feather, plume." 

You may also know penne as the type of pasta with cylinder-shaped pieces, their ends cut at a bias. Penne is the plural form of the Italian penna (meaning feather but also the writing pen) which also goes back to the Latin penna and is a cognate of the English word pen.

The sense and word was extended to any instrument of similar form used for writing by used a fluid ink. Pen-and-ink as an adjective meaning "made or done with a pen and ink" is attested from 1670s.

Sticks of pure graphite (AKA black lead) were used for marking things in England from the mid-16th century and later in the century the wooden enclosure for the graphite was added to protect the graphite and the hand of the writer.

The word "pencil" came from Old French pincel, from Latin penicillus meaning a "little tail." These early pencils were made as an artist's fine brush of camel hair which could make a fine line and could make letters. They were used art and also for writing before modern lead or chalk pencils. The stylus, a thin metal stick used for scratching in papyrus or wax tablets, was used by the Romans and for palm-leaf manuscripts.

Also during the 16th century, the word pencil was transferred from meaning a type of fine brush to a graphite writing implement. 

In the 19th century, the clay-graphite mix was developed and so was the mass-production. c. Hymen L. Lipman of Philadelphia obtained a patent for the pencil with an attached eraser in 1858. The pencil-sharpener as a mechanical device for putting the point on a lead pencil arrived in 1854.

By extension, the term "pen name" appears in the mid-1800s as being a fictitious name assumed by an author. Earlier, the French nom de plume had been used in English to mean the same thing.

Some other uses that are not in common usage today are "pen-gossip" meaning to gossip by correspondence; a "pencil-pusher" was a derogatory term used to describe a low-level office worker along with "pen-driver" for a clerk. The term "pencil neck" came into use briefly around 1973 to mean a weak person. 

Trivia

It is odd that "trivia" is information and data that are considered to be of "little value." It wasn't always that way.

In ancient Rome, the trivia (singular trivium) are grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which were considered to be the topics of basic education. They provided the foundation for the quadrivia of higher education.

So why was this information demoted? 

Romans used triviae to describe where one road split or forked into two roads (tri = three) + viae = roads) and became a term for a public place or a common place. (Trivia was also, in Roman mythology, the goddess who haunted crossroads, graveyards, and was the goddess of sorcery and witchcraft.)

Trivia meaning "trite, commonplace, unimportant, slight" occurs from the late 16th century, and appears in the works of Shakespeare. It may be that the lower levels of the educational curriculum were seen as less important than those of higher education.

Trivia as a kind of game or amusement began to appear in books and newspapers in the early 20th century and the board game Trivial Pursuit was released in 1982 and became popular. Trivia nights also became a popular pub game and competition.

The questions asked in that game and those competitions are often not what I would consider "trivial" or of little value. To know who was President Eisenhower's Vice-President is not on the same level as knowing what the name of Eisenhower's pet dog at the White House. (Richard Nixon and Heidi in case it comes up in a trivia game).

Much of what is considered trivial these days seems to me to be of some value, but with the overload of information presented to us, more and more of it is demoted to a place of lesser value.

Trivial Pursuit game cards