It's a Kind of Magic by Victoria Chatham

 

COMING IN SEPTEMBER 2025

Writers have a lot of words to play with, roughly one million of them in the English language. How we choose them and in what order we place them eventually becomes the stories we tell and the books we read.

Some books are long, others short, and others in between, but in all those words lies magic. The magic holds us spellbound, so as readers, our only option is to turn the page to discover what the author’s characters have in store for us. Read a romance or a fantasy and succumb to the enchantment of that author’s creativity. Savour the words on the page.

My words

So, where did all those words come from? Research has shown that our million or so words have developed over the last fifteen thousand years since the end of the last Ice Age, giving or taking a century or two here and there. Reputed to be the oldest words in our language are ‘thou’ and ‘mother.’ Currently, the longest word in English is forty-five letters long and is a medical term referring to a lung disease contracted from inhaling fine silica particles. Check any good English dictionary for pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

It is not likely a reader would find that in a novel, but what about the shortest words? That good old stalwart indefinite article ‘a’ is the first that comes to mind, but don’t forget the pronoun ‘I’, which is always written in upper case. Numerous three-letter words exist, as any Scrabble player will appreciate, but not as many two-letter words. Of these, my favourite is the ubiquitous ‘up’.

At its most basic, its definition means moving to a higher position, but how many ways can it be applied? We wake up and get up. Topics come up. We call someone on the phone. We line up and can work up an appetite. A drain can be stopped up, so we open it up – or, more likely, the plumber does. We clean up the house, warm up leftovers, and respond to our teenager’s ‘Wassup?’ And then there is that universal, slightly risqué phrase referring to pregnancy, knocked up. 

Image from flashbak.com

There are several suggestions for its origin, but it likely dates from about 1760, when the Industrial Revolution developed in what was then Great Britain. The workforce needed to staff factories sprouting up like mushrooms was gleaned from the ever-increasing number of people moving from the country to towns and cities. Used to getting up as soon as it was light and going to bed when it was dark, these people radically adjusted their lives, as being late for work usually meant instant dismissal. 

The role of the knocker up was to tap on the bedroom window, making sure they were awake and preparing to go to whatever grimy hellhole employed them at low wages for twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week. The person doing the knocking, using a long pole with a knob or crown on its top, might be paid a small sum for the service. They might cover several miles in an area, walking up one side of the street and down the other. Once factory horns and reliable alarm clocks were invented, the practice of knocking up gradually died out, although, in one area in northeast England, it continued into the 1960s.

This post began with 'Writers have a lot of words to play with,' and the magic is I have only played with five hundred and fifty-six of them. There could have been so much more.

Victoria Chatham

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