Uh-oh. Is the SDMB the source for an urban legend meme?

WhyNot · January 31, 2014, 6:03am

One common Aramaic fiction that tends to circulate all over the place is that the magic word “Abracadabra” is originally from an Aramaic phrase that means “I create as I speak” which is usually spelled out as אברא כדברא.

The thing is that, אברא כדברא cannot possibly mean “I create as I speak” and here is why:

<snip>
So where did “I create as I speak” come in? During that crazy time of rampant speculation, it was merely lost in the shuffle. It’s when we catch up with the dawn of the Information Age that we find it appear on the Internet via the Straight Dope message board on March 25, 1999:
In this week's column, Cecil gives three explanations for the term "Abracadabra", but none of them is the one I had heard while growing up. I am an Orthodox Jew, and I had always been told that it comes from the Hebrew "Abra", meaning "I will create", "Ke-dabra", meaning (roughly) "as I speak"...i.e., invoking the divine powers of creation-through-speech as in Genesis.
And a response on April 18th confirms the source as:
A source for the "Abracadabra" etymology: in "The Book of Words" (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1993, p. 11), Rabbi Lawrence Kushner mentions that "The Aramaic for 'I create as I speak' is avara k'dvara, or, in magician's language, abracadabra."
A name! We apparently have Rabbi Kushner to blame for publishing this particular etymology, but we cannot blame him for what happened next.

From this one message board it spread like all misinformation does on the Internet: Like wildfire. Faster than truth.

So, do we have to *mea *this culpa?

Here’s the (archived) SDMB thread.

ORIGINAL COLUMN: What’s the origin of “abracadabra,” “hocus-pocus,” and “presto”? - The Straight Dope

buddha_david · January 31, 2014, 6:14am

Always thought it was a pretty cool Steve Miller Band song, if nothing else.

Guinastasia · January 31, 2014, 7:44am

Just remember that it’s one of the three Unforgiveable Curses. You can end up serving a life sentence in Azkaban for using it.

samclem · January 31, 2014, 1:23pm

OED:

Etymology: < post-classical Latin abracadabra, a magical word (end of the 4th cent.), further etymology uncertain and disputed (see below). Compare Middle French, French abracadabra instance or utterance of the magical word (1585; the sense ‘obscure or nonsense language, gibberish’ is apparently not paralleled until later: 1949 or earlier), German Abrakadabra (1583 as †abracadabra denoting an instance or utterance of the magical word, 1755 in sense ‘obscure or nonsense language, gibberish’).
The etymology of post-classical Latin abracadabra has been the subject of much conjecture; no documentation has been found to support any of the various conjectures which have been put forward. Some have suggested an origin within Latin or Greek, e.g. as an alteration of abecedarius abecedary adj. with insertion of euphonic elements (e.g. -ra- ), others a borrowing from languages as diverse as Thracian (a sparsely attested Indo-European language) and Sumerian. A connection with post-classical Latin abraxas , Hellenistic Greek Ἀβράξας abraxas n. has also frequently been suggested, but the nature of any relationship is unclear. A further large group of etymological suggestions tries to derive the word from Hebrew or Aramaic in various ways, involving, for example, an alteration of an unknown Aramaic name of a demon, or a connection with Hebrew bĕrāḵāh ‘blessing’ and dāḇar ‘to speak’ or dāḇār ‘speech, word’, but again, supporting evidence is lacking, and the use of the magical word in Jewish sources does not seem to be attested before the early Middle Ages.

No foundation for the Hebrew or Aramaic origins.

Fear_Itself · January 31, 2014, 1:50pm

Cecil’s original column:

What’s the origin of “abracadabra,” “hocus-pocus,” and “presto”?

Marley23 · January 31, 2014, 2:30pm

Moving this to the Comments forum from Great Debates.

WhyNot · January 31, 2014, 2:49pm

You’re the boss, but might I suggest ATMB instead? It’s not about the Column, it’s about the allegation that the thread on the message board led the internet astray, and the result is now polluting Facebook. Again. Nearly 15 years later.

Sorry, I suppose I should have put more word thingies in the OP; it was late, and I composed in my head instead of on the screen.

C_K_Dexter_Haven · January 31, 2014, 2:58pm

Since the “correction” is to something on the Message Boards rather than Cecil’s column, I don’t know that we need to do anything. And I’m not sure that it’s a “correction”: in the old (1999) thread, cmkeller starts the thread by saying he had heard the origin was Hebrew. Post #9 asserts it was Aramaic, picked up by Post #16 which attributes R. Lawrence Kushner as saying the origin was Aramaic. [Alas, this thread is so old that the names of the posters are lost, so I don’t know who they were or whether they’re still around.]

The Aramaic blog cited by WhyNot in the OP for this thread says that the phrase is NOT Aramaic, but says nothing about the Hebrew origin (in fact, tends to support the Hebrew origin.) They do seem to blame Post #16 and Kushner for the spread of the (incorrect) attribution to Aramaic origin. Seems pretty much ridiculous to me, to blame us for the spread of the misinformation. This is a Message Board, people say all sorts of things here (true and false and indeterminable.) I think they are doing us a disservice by implying that we’re responsible.

I also see that the Aramaic blog has added a footnote that

There certainly was some free borrowing going on between Hebrew and Aramaic (in both directions, even) in the Rabbinic period to time that Kabbalah was forming and even to this day it continues. The root דבר was not directly attested in Aramaic as a verb, but was inflected as a noun in various ways in a few dialects of Jewish Aramaic (דביר, דיבור), but in most of these cases it was simply calqued for religious jargon (where general glosses might be favored by some lexicographers, it was more specifically for where דבר is translated from Hebrew, adapted as the name of a particular Hebrew prayer, etc.). Calques are a gray nether-area between languages, and when it comes to דבר in Aramaic vocabulary, I’m not convinced that it integrated enough to call it “Aramaic” without qualification.

So, he’s saying it’s possibly Aramaic-related but not “pure” Aramaic? Seems to me that we have here a linguistic purist, and (sorry) language doesn’t work that way.

Chronos · January 31, 2014, 3:01pm

It’s not “we” who are to blame. At most, it’s cmkeller who’s to blame. Even there, though, it’s not like he’s speaking from authority: He’s just saying that it’s “something he heard growing up”. Which it probably was. The fault lies on anyone who took that as a definitive proof of origin, not on one guy who related an old family story.

Really_Not_All_That_Bright · January 31, 2014, 4:30pm

Somebody fetch cmkeller while I warm up the tar and fluff the feathers.

C_K_Dexter_Haven · February 1, 2014, 2:00pm

No, cmkeller said he heard it was from Hebrew. The Aramaic blog doesn’t deny that. It’s the later post #9 (and I don’t know who the poster was because it’s so old, the names are gone) that says it was Aramaic.

Also, today being Saturday, cmkeller won’t be posting until tomorrow. There’s a corollary of Murphy’s Law that any thread involving Judaism or Hebrew or whatever always starts on Friday or Saturday so that Orthodox Jews can’t post.