Pylimitics

Imagine what it’s like to know nothing at all about how to read. Not even a general idea that the marks on a page are “letters” that represent sounds, or that when put together they represent the words you’re already familiar with hearing. If you’re from a society that’s mostly illiterate, or “preliterate,” it might seem inexplicable. In that environment, there might be many other inexplicable things in your world. People in that situation might have few resources, even in their own minds, to arrive at explanations that would seem reasonable to those of us who take for granted that we can consult and consider the recorded thoughts and studies of countless others. 

Even in a preliterate society, though, people nevertheless find their own explanations for things. That explaining process, which is close to storytelling, is probably an inherent characteristic of human cognition. Faced with inexplicable events like the strange idea that an inanimate object called a “book” can “contain knowledge,” the explanation they come up with might sound to us like “magical thinking”. 

Medieval England was largely a preliterate society, especially in regard to Latin, which was regarded as the language of learning and knowledge. Even if you were quite adept at your native Middle English language, Latin might be a complete mystery. Another thing about Latin that you might have heard of from your betters was “grammar.” Latin had all sorts of rules that the educated elite said were contained in books regular folks didn’t understand.  The very idea of “rules” for a language might be pretty mysterious to those regular folks. They knew perfectly well how to talk to their friends and neighbors, but they hadn’t been taught any rules about that. (They had learned rules, of course, but organically, and they hadn’t noticed.) The educated in those days called the books with the rules “grammars.”

An uneducated serf wouldn’t have known this at the time, but “grammar” itself is from Latin; it’s based on the Latin word “grammatica” (the study of literature), and had come to England by way of French, where it was “grammaire.” That serf might not know quite what it referred to, but might have heard of “grammar.” They might also be well aware that the educated in society — who were mostly likely quite ready to belittle and oppress the serf and their fellow peons — payed a great deal of respect to this “grammar” stuff.

It might not have been much of a stretch for the serf and their mates to arrive at the explanation that there was something supernatural about “grammar.” They might have discovered, or even guessed, that among the “books” those elites prized so highly, there were also some special ones that contained specific instructions for especially magical sorts of things. These books weren’t exactly “grammars;” the serfs were pretty sure of that — but they were close. The books acquired the label “grimoires,” which is actually a modification of “grammar”. Both grammars and grimoires had to do with things that could explained, but for which the common folks’ explanation — their story, so to speak — was what we’d call “magical.” 

Grimoire is still the name for a book of magic spells. The story of grimoires is where the idea of magic words and magic spells comes from. In most cases, “magic words” you find in stories and magic acts are, or at least sound a lot like, borrowings from Latin. Oculus Reparo!