This is the Illusionist in which I, Helen Zoltzman, splat the linguistic rat.

Today, etymologies you requested, you sent in knots, thank you very much.

This is just some and if yours is not included, come for yourself with one of these reasons,

one, cover it before, browse through theillusionist.org slash lexicon to find the relevant episode.

Two, some of the questions were big enough to require their own episode, so sit tight because I hope to be able to bring in such a soon.

Three, your questions were good, but either the dictionary or my brain couldn't supply a good answer, that's just how it goes sometimes.

I must admit, I spend a bit too much of yesterday, even in trying to figure out a request from Kate, whether the word seminal is sexist.

What's my verdict? There's none to find out. On with the show.

Do you start just a little bit of etymology, and squeezing to the last episode about zero, not, which conveys both nothingness and the number zero.

It's from middle English and it meant zero before English had zero, but it was a reselling of the old English word, no it, meaning nothing.

If you say ought to mean zero, which I believe is the American English option, well, that got all flipped around because ought is from the old English are wit, which means everything.

How did everything come to mean nothing? Well, it's all thanks to that old agent of chaos, misdivision, not content with making a naprin and apron and a numpire and umpire, it turned a naught into an ought.

Nought also had another meaning, which is retained a little bit in naughty. It meant something evil. So from there, let us head straight over to your request that feel relevant to the Halloween season, which is apparently what the month of October is called now.

Look, I didn't invent it, just reporting it.

Brad says, Conja, how did it go from meaning, swearing an oath together to make something appear from up your sleeve? Great question, Brad. Although I think it is only had the rabbit in the hat kind of meaning for a couple of hundred years, stage magic had been around for a long time before that, but tended to be called other things such as leisure to mount, which was a French word meaning light of hand.

The plunger has been around in English since the mid-13th century at least and did mean to summon with magic the same as the old French word came from Conja, which came from a Latin verb, con-nurare, which as Brad said means to swear an oath together.

Con is together and the U part is from the Latin word use meaning law. That's the same root as jury, judge, justice, con-nurare also meant to pray because swearing an oath was to a deity, so the concepts are not that far apart.

But somewhere along the way, Conja got a little whiff of swearing an oath with a demon. Hey, guess what else has a swearing an oath, etymology, exorcism? A word that appeared almost synonymously with Conjuring a few hundred years ago when those words were both newish to English, the both summoning spirits, the crucial difference between them being that exorcisms were considered legit because priest did them to summon and thus banish spirits and also to study the spirits because God had a lot of faith in God.

And so the spirits, because God had a lot of faith in God, and so did the spirits, because God had a lot of faith in God.

So there were summoning spirits for non-demonic purposes. Now, naughty, remember there was a long period in the English using nations where Christian rituals, incantations and props, good, all others bad, monotheism, good, pantheism, bad. Although for much of human existence, magic and religion have bubbled away together in the same cauldron, cauldron is from the Latin hot bath, by the way, as Christianity took hold across Europe, non-Christian practices had to be sequestered off as paganism.

And then paganism had to be demonized, literally and figuratively, to keep people Christian.

Hmm, I'm not sure I'm really able to answer your question, Brad, about exactly when and why Conjure underwent this transformation from oath-swearing to spirit summoning and then to performing illusions.

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