By Susan Harper
You can read a long way down in the dictionary, under the word “spell” before you get to anything about putting letters together to make a word. It surprises me to tell you this, but in my trusty Webster’s the first entry for “spell” has to do with magic, and the synonym offered is “incantation.”
This makes a certain kind of sense to me. Even as a child I thought there was tremendous power in words — a notion confirmed for me by the idea that the pen is mightier than the sword, although that too offered a surprise when I actually looked it up. The original quote, from a play by Edward Bulwer Lytton, says, “Beneath the rule of men entirely great / The pen is mightier than the sword,” suggesting that where tyrants reign, the pen is relatively powerless. But that doesn’t mean that words are. Even under tyrants, people talk.
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