Magic words

A magic word does something rather than meaning something, and the definition supplies the test. Where usage is unrelated to the word's meaning in universal reality, the word is being used for effect, and the effects Marsh lists are the same operations magic performs generally, creating an endogroup or an endoreality and casting information as authoritative or not according to who is associated with it. Endoreality is filled with such words, which have no universal meaning but serve to cast people as endo-ideal or negative image. The endo-identity is one of them, a magical word used to set an endogroup off as exceptional and create difference where none exists. Curses are another category, and Marsh's account of swearing follows from it, since a curse word is an otherwise meaningless word serving to condemn a person to the negative image and assign them guilt for whatever is done to them. The mechanism is visible in ordinary settings once named. A man seeking to exclude a woman at work makes a derogatory joke about women that his male colleagues are expected to laugh at, and any who do not are subjected to a further word aimed at them. Nothing in the exchange depends on the words describing anything. Their function is placement, and the test of a magic word is that substituting an accurate description would not accomplish the same thing.

J.L. Austin's performative utterances describe words that do rather than report, and the speech act tradition after him distinguishes what an utterance says from what it accomplishes. Orwell's Newspeak is the popular reference for vocabulary engineered to constrain thought, Victor Klemperer recorded the same engineering as it happened, and framing research in political communication studies how word choice determines what an issue is taken to be. Marsh's version differs by grounding the effect in a comparison with universal reality, which gives a criterion the performative literature lacks. Austin classifies an utterance by whether it accomplishes something, and she classifies it by whether what it accomplishes has any relation to what it says.