THE MEANING OF MEANINGLESS WORDS AND THE COEFFICIENT OF WEIRDNESS

Bronislaw Malinowski

"Thus all magical verbiage shows a very considerable coefficient of weirdness, strangeness and unusualness. The better we know the Trobriand language the more clearly and immediately can we distinguish magic from ordinary speech. The most grammatical and least emphatically chanted spell differs from the forms of ordinary address. Most magic, moreover, is chanted in a sing-song which makes it from the outset profoundly different from ordinary utterances. The wording of magic is correlated with a very complicated dogmatic system, with theories about the primeval mystical power of words, about mythological influences, about the faint co-operation of ancestral spirits and, much more important, about the sympathetic influence of animals, plants, natural forces and objects. Unless a competent commentator is secured who, in each specific case, will interpret the elements of weirdness, the allusions, the personal names or the magical pseudonyms, it is impossible to translate magic. Moreover, as a comparison of the various formulae has shown us, there has developed a body of linguistic practice-- use of metaphor, opposition, repetition, negative comparison, imperative and question with answer--which, though not developed into any explicit doctrine, makes the language of magic specific, unusual, quaint." (emphasis added)