{"slug": "words-are-power", "title": "Words Are Power", "summary": "The essay traces the historical and linguistic roots of the idea that words hold power, from the ancient medical use of 'abracadabra' to modern AI prompting. It explores how terms like 'grammar,' 'glamour,' and 'spell' reveal a deep connection between language, learning, and enchantment, and draws parallels to programming and AI interfaces where precise sequences of words produce effects.", "body_md": "[Back to Journal](/blog)\n\n# Words Are PowerFrom abracadabra to AI prompts\n\nThe power was never hidden in secret syllables. It belonged to whoever could name the thing, choose the formula, and recognize whether it worked. Prompting gives that old asymmetry a new interface.\n\nIn the third century, Quintus Serenus Sammonicus prescribed a word. His *Liber Medicinalis* instructed readers to write [abracadabra](/word/abracadabra) in a diminishing triangle, hang it around the neck, and wear it against a recurrent fever, probably malaria ( [CDC, Emerging Infectious Diseases](https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/25/2/ac-2502_article)). Not the word as advice or prayer. The word, taken as a dose.\n\nThe popular gloss “I create as I speak” is too perfect to be trusted. The word's origin remains disputed; proposed Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin derivations are theories, not settled history. What the surviving text establishes is narrower and stranger: one medical text treated a written word as medicine.\n\nTo an observer, a spell is sound. To its practitioner, it is a sequence: words chosen, ordered, and delivered under rules. But sequence never acts alone. A wedding vow, a judge's sentence, and a password work because the right system receives them in the right circumstances and their effect can be recognized. The modern version of those conditions is a model, a context, and a test. We will return to all three.\n\nEnglish preserves several revealing links between learning and enchantment. The links are real. The neat story often told about them is not always so tidy.\n\n## Grammar, grimoire, glamour: related histories\n\nThe dictionary evidence is better than the candlelit folklore. French [grimoire](/word/grimoire) is an alteration of Old French *gramaire*, which could refer to grammar, a learned work, or a book of witchcraft ( [Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grimoire)). In early eighteenth-century Scots, a form of *grammar* became [glamour](/word/glamour), meaning a magic spell or enchantment ( [Merriam-Webster's word history](https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/the-history-of-glamour)). Modern glamour — allure, polish, celebrity — came later.\n\nEtymology does not prove a theory of language. It preserves a social intuition: learning lets one person see and do what another cannot yet name.\n\n## Two histories hiding inside “spell”\n\nModern English makes [spell](/word/spell) look like one word with a magical double life. It is actually several homographs. The noun behind a magic spell descends directly from Old English *spel*, meaning speech, story, or sermon; [gospel](/word/gospel) preserves that older sense as “good tale” or good news. The verb meaning to name letters reached Middle English by a different route, through Anglo-French *espeller*. The two senses converged in modern English, although their deeper Germanic histories may be related ( [Merriam-Webster's history of spell](https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-history-spell)). Their meeting still feels exact: in both spelling and spell-casting, sequence carries the consequence. Get it wrong and the charm fails. Ask any programmer.\n\n## Invoke, conjure, enchant: the programmer's séance\n\nTo [invoke](/word/invocation) a function is standard technical English. The verb came through Latin *invocare*, “to call upon,” and still also means to appeal to an authority or put something into operation ( [Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/invoke)). [Conjure](/word/conjure) followed a different path, from Latin *conjurare*, to join in taking an oath, toward summoning by incantation ( [Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conjure)). Developers use it informally when a command seems to produce a whole environment at once. The vocabulary makes software sound like a [séance](/word/seance): exact words entered, distant machinery stirred. The joke became an interface.\n\n## The power of the true name\n\nThe [true name](/word/true-name) is a recurring device rather than one universal rule of magic. Rumpelstiltskin loses his leverage when his name is discovered; Ursula K. Le Guin makes knowledge of true names central to Earthsea's fictional magic. The pattern works because a name can turn an unknown thing into a particular one. Prompting inherits that practical advantage. Asking for “that painting style with the dramatic light” is ambiguous; naming [tenebrism](/word/tenebrism) supplies a recognized concept for a model to interpret. One term replaces a gesture with a distinction.\n\n## When a word is a weapon\n\nWords have also served as checkpoints. In Judges 12, Gileadite guards at the Jordan fords make suspected Ephraimite fugitives say [shibboleth](/word/shibboleth); the pronunciation *sibboleth* identifies them for execution. The passage reports 42,000 Ephraimites dead in the conflict, not 42,000 individually documented pronunciation tests ( [Judges 12:4-6](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+12%3A4-6&version=NET)). *Shibboleth*now names a word or custom that distinguishes insiders from outsiders. It is also the essay's darkest verification test: a word spoken into a system, measured against a standard, with consequences determined by the result. Long before software, language was already serving as a checkpoint.\n\n## Words that do things\n\nIn his 1955 William James Lectures, J. L. Austin examined utterances that perform an action rather than report one: “I do,” “I name this ship,” “I hereby resign.” He also gave their failures a name: infelicities. “I do” outside a recognized wedding marries no one; a judgment pronounced by a bystander carries no legal force. A performative succeeds when speaker, procedure, and circumstance line up. The lectures became, perfectly, *How to Do Things with Words* ( [Oxford Academic](https://academic.oup.com/book/5162)).\n\nA prompt usually has the force of a directive: typing it performs the request, not the action requested. What follows is a response made possible by the system around the words. Austin supplies the bridge from spell to software: language acts only through conditions outside itself. For prompting, practical success depends on the model, the [context](/word/context), and the [test](/word/verification). The model must be capable, the context must carry what the task needs, and the result must face a standard. Vocabulary lets the person at the keyboard state that standard more exactly.\n\n## The machine at the other end of the words\n\nProse has begun to behave like code. Write a sentence, and software changes what it does next. Not with a compiler's certainty: prompting changes the odds, not the laws. Tell a generative model *make it better* and it must guess what *better* means. The [prompt](/word/prompt) names no desired change and no way to recognize one. [Backlit](/word/backlit), by contrast, names a lighting relationship; [terse](/word/terse) names a constraint on length and delivery. Each word gives the request a handle where vague approval gave it only a gesture.\n\nOne famous historical snapshot makes that sensitivity visible. In 2022, Kojima and colleagues added the five-word instruction *“Let's think step by step”*and raised text-davinci-002's MultiArith accuracy from 17.7% to 78.7%, and its GSM8K accuracy from 10.4% to 40.7% ( [Kojima et al., 2022](https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2022/hash/8bb0d291acd4acf06ef112099c16f326-Abstract-Conference.html)). Then Zhou and colleagues handed the search for the instruction to the model. Its automatically discovered version lifted the same scores again, to 82.0% and 43.0% ( [Zhou et al., 2023](https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.01910)). The machine had picked up the chalk. The phrase is not current advice or a universal charm; the result records what a particular model revealed about the leverage of wording.\n\nEven typography enters the ritual. In few-shot experiments, Sclar and colleagues measured gaps of up to 76 accuracy points between plausible prompt formats for LLaMA-2-13B ( [Sclar et al., 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11324)). In text classification experiments, Salinas and Morstatter observed answers changing after a perturbation as small as a trailing space ( [Salinas & Morstatter, 2024](https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.275/)). Those are not victories for prompt craft. They are evidence of brittleness: format noise can swamp meaning. Precision governs the aim, not the hit. It makes the intended direction inspectable even when the model's mapping from words to answers is noisy.\n\nModern models complicate the story. Hua and colleagues found in 2025 that some reported prompt sensitivity shrank when semantically equivalent answers were judged as equivalent ( [Hua et al., 2025](https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1006/)). That is the direction better models should move: rescuing more mumbles and reducing the value of prompt folklore. It does not reduce the value of direction. The durable advantage is not getting something good; it is getting closer to the thing you meant, then having words precise enough to judge it.\n\nThe same trade works in text. “Make this email more professional” invites generic business prose; make it *terse*, [plainspoken](/word/plainspoken), with no hedging and one apology at most, and the request acquires choices a person can inspect. The advantage is not merely that the prompt is longer. Its author can name what generic professionalism leaves blurry.\n\n## The old asymmetry, in a new interface\n\nThe interface even preserves ceremonial names. A [system prompt](/word/system-prompt) lays down standing instructions; a [negative prompt](/word/negative-prompt) names exclusions in some image workflows. But the deeper inheritance is the asymmetry. The old stories hid power in a secret word. Austin found it in the fit between an utterance and the world prepared to receive it. Prompting makes a related fit visible.\n\nOne person asks for dramatic light. Another asks for *tenebrism*, backlighting, and negative space. The second has not acquired a charm; they have acquired more handles on the world. They can aim more exactly, revise more deliberately, and say why the result does or does not work. The machine supplies possibilities. Vocabulary lets its user make distinctions among them.\n\n## The spellbook, as vocabulary\n\nThe vocabulary of verbal magic survives because it names a durable hope: that an intention can be shaped into words, and words into action. Words of Power follows that vocabulary through its histories, metaphors, and modern echoes.\n\n[incantationa ritual formula whose words are treated as the mechanism](/word/incantation)\n\n[invocationcalling on a power by name](/word/invocation)\n\n[séancea meeting held in an attempt to receive spirit communications](/word/seance)\n\n[conjureto summon by invocation, or produce as if by magic](/word/conjure)\n\n[grimoirea spellbook; from an alteration of French grammaire](/word/grimoire)\n\n[glamoura Scots alteration of grammar that once meant enchantment](/word/glamour)\n\n[runea character from an early Germanic alphabet, later used in magic](/word/rune)\n\n[sigila sign or emblem used in magical practice](/word/sigil)\n\n[abracadabraa magic word recorded in an ancient fever remedy](/word/abracadabra)\n\n[open sesamethe phrase that unlocks what force cannot](/word/open-sesame)\n\n[shibboletha word used as a border checkpoint](/word/shibboleth)\n\n[benedictiona spoken blessing](/word/benediction)\n\n[true namea name that grants power in myth and fiction](/word/true-name)\n\n## From metaphor to practice\n\nWords of Power follows the ritual vocabulary behind the metaphor. Creative Direction puts the same thesis to work in lighting, composition, color, and tone. The first explains the hook; the second supplies the handles.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/words-are-power", "canonical_source": "https://segue.app/blog/words-are-power", "published_at": "2026-07-13 17:50:51+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-13 18:05:31.990675+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "natural-language-processing", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Quintus Serenus Sammonicus", "Liber Medicinalis", "CDC", "Merriam-Webster"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/words-are-power", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/words-are-power.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/words-are-power.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/words-are-power.jsonld"}}