Beguiled by a Magic Word

It's "very irritating to find you've run out of steam half way through a long thought because you've been beguiled by some magic word in the middle of it."
—Michael Pennington, "Barnardine's Straw: The Devil in Shakespeare's Detail," 2004 Lectures

Hello

"The magic word 'Hello,' besides helping us to begin our conversation to anyone, has also a valuable meaning of greeting others, thus paving a way to settle conflicts, if any."
—R.B., "Safety, How Far?" Chennaionline

A Forehead Like a Tarot Card

(Click image for full size.)

Life

"Life is a magic word; it is something everyone hungers for. Audiences everywhere resonated with the cry 'To life!' in Fiddler on the Roof."
—Gerald O'Collins, Following the Way, 2001

Life has also been likened to a magic:

• mirror
• age
• vase
• web
• lantern
• potion
• mountain
• garden
• act
• ring
• trick
• show
• reality
• wonderland
• flight
• hat
• circle
• thing
• balance
• void
• gift
• torch
• shadow-box

Zolda Pranken Kopeck Lum

These are the magic words the character Uncle Arthur teaches Darrin Stephens in the television series Bewitched, when Darrin is convinced he’s been turned into a Warlock.

Tarot to Cards

Changing one letter at a time, the word tarot takes us to cards:

TAROT
TAROS (edible tropical plants)
SAROS (a period between solar and lunar eclipses)
SARDS (varieties of chalcedony)
CARDS

Madrigal

Etymologist Adrian Room notes that "It was Christopher Marlowe who wrote the magic words, 'Melodious birds sing madrigals,' and the word itself is so evocative that it conjures up a whole host of agreeable but unfortunately wrong associations, among them 'magical,' 'magnify,' 'melodical,' 'Magnificat,' 'musical,' 'canticle,' or some sort of heady blend of these. And the charm of the word is just as potent today as the songs themselves were in historic times." Room traces madrigal to the Medieval Latin matricale ("primitive") and Late Latin matricalis ("of the womb"), "perhaps referring to a 'maternal' poem or song, one that was sung in the mother tongue" (A Dictionary of True Etymologies, 1988).