Prestidigitation: Neither Voodoo, Hoodoo nor Hindu

Growing up, I watched a lot of old movies. I stand by my prejudice that older movies - at least in terms of dialogue - weren't as stupid as a lot of movies today. Many of them, including movies geared towards young viewers, used intelligent language and made references to events that required the audience to have some educated knowledge of history before they turned the movie on. It was films like these that shaped me into the nerd I am today. My dad would buy us VHS cassettes of old Disney films and other classics that he had watched as a child. "The Adventures of Robin Hood" with Errol Flynn is still one of my favorite movies of all time - it's a dream adventure in Technicolor. As a 7-year-old boy, it was all I could ask for in a movie. "Pirates of the Caribbean" has absolutely nothing on it in terms of swash or buckle. Or real joy.

                                                              Or timelessness. Jack Sparrow, eat your heart out.

Another favorite was "Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier." A live-action Disney film from the 1960s, it featured the taciturn Fess Parker as the coonskin-capped frontiersman, with the lovable Buddy Epsen as his historical... buddy (argh!) and co-adventurer, Georgie Russell, whose signature phrase throughout their journeys was, "Give 'em what-for, Davy!"

Sometimes, I'll remember a word or phrase from my childhood because it was in an old movie like that. For example, "give 'em what-for" is something I'll never forget. Today's word, "prestidigitation" - in keeping with the idea behind this blog - is brought to you in part by Cormac McCarthy's novel, Blood Meridian, which contains some of the most impressive language I've ever read. At first glance, I thought I'd never encountered that word before in my life. But, thanks to my incredibly random memory of movie quotes heard in childhood, I can prove that this word is also brought to you in part by Disney's "Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier."

But let's get the word out of the way: "prestitigitation". It means trickery or deceit by use of one's hands. So basically parlor trickery. By my count, the word "prestidigitant" appears just once in McCarthy's novel, and even then, not in the main text. Instead, it appears in a chapter synopsis. Each chapter of Blood Meridian begins with an episodic summary of what will happen in that chapter (much like every chapter of Huckleberry Finn does). One pre-chapter synopsis contains the following fragment, describing a scene in the upcoming chapter: "the judge prestidigitant." I remember reading that word for the first time and being dumbfounded.

The judge - that is, Judge Holden - is the terrifying and fascinating villain of Blood Meridian, who chillingly shares certain characteristics of the Prince of Lies himself, and may be responsible for much of the evil circumstances that befall the book's characters. Much of the story's dialogue revolves around whether the judge is a man, or something more - hinting that he is an agent of evil forces, or perhaps even the devil incarnate. He possesses skill and knowledge of things that man would not (or should not) have reason to naturally understand. But I won't dwell on that now. Instead, see my earlier post on the judge here. For now, we'll talk about one of the judge's skills - magic. In the Bible, magic and sorcery are consistently referred to as "false" and evil; by their nature, they are not-of-God. But in Blood Meridian, the judge's tricks are mere sleight-of-hand. Or are they...? Consider: the judge has the ability to throw a coin out over a large campfire and send it glittering across the desert at night, only to have it return to reappear in his hand. Such a feat only helps blur the lines for the reader as to whether the judge is a wily human or a malevolent avatar of supernatural evil.

In the chapter where the word "prestidigitant" appears in the synopsis, the judge works his magic on a poor Mexican boy who is selling puppies in town. He does a coin trick for the boy to get the puppies, and then moments later tosses the helpless dogs into a nearby river to drown. That's just a taste of the judge's unpredictably random, casually nihilistic violence. The judge's creed - his gospel message to the other characters throughout Blood Meridian - is that evil is the only constant core "value" in this world. Notice the perverse religious imagery McCarthy uses here (A ciborium is a vessel used in Catholic liturgy to hold the species of bread shared as the Body of Christ during communion.):

The dogvendor took this for a bargaining device and studied the dogs anew to better determine their worth, but the judge had dredged from his polluted clothes a small gold coin worth a bushel of suchpriced dogs. He laid the coin in the palm of his hand and held it out and with the other hand took the pups from their keeper, holding them in one fist like a pair of socks. He gestured with the gold.

Andale, he said.

The boy stared at the coin.

The judge made a fist and opened it. The coin was gone. He wove his fingers in the empty air and reached behind the boy's ear and took the coin and handed it to him. The boy held the coin in both hands before him like a small ciborium and he looked up at the judge. But the judge had set forth, dogs dangling. He crossed upon the stone bridge and he looked down into the swollen waters and raised the dogs and pitched them in.

After I'd first read that chapter, I still didn't know what "prestidigitant" meant. Had I remembered some of my Latin, I wouldn't have been so frustrated. In Italian, "presto" simply means "fast" or "quickly." I should have made that connection from my classical music background. "Presto change-o" is a comedic exclamation I also remembered from old kids' cartoons. "Presto" comes from the Latin "praestus," meaning "ready at hand." And a "digit" is a finger, coming from the Latin word for finger, "digitus." So, prestidigitation is the art of fast hands, or sleight-of-hand. In a word, it's magic. Here's a dictionary definition:

prestidigitation 

1. A performance of or skill in performing magic or conjuring tricks with the hands; sleight of hand.

   My favorite prestidigitation was when he pulled the live dove out of that tiny scarf.

2. A show of skill or deceitful cleverness.

   His writing was peppered with verbal tricks and prestidigitation.

   
   

When I was a kid watching "Davy Crockett," I didn't understand half the words uttered during the riverboat gambler scene (which I'll provide below), but I still got the gist of it. Crockett and Russell meet a future ally named Thimblerig (whose name is a joke in itself). He challenges Davy to a bet over a parlor trick, hiding a pea beneath one of three thimbles and asking him to choose which one has the pea beneath it. Thimblerig assures onlookers that "no chicanery is at work here, nor are any natural laws violated" - and that his game is prestidigitation, "an old and honorable art - neither voodoo, hoodoo, nor Hindu!" When I was small, I thought he was just making up magic words like, "nadavoodoo, hoodoo, nahindoo." But now, understanding that he's an educated charlatan, I see that his character was supposed to possess a flashy vocabulary that viewers (such as my 7-year-old-self) would instantly recognize as a foil to Davy Crockett's honest, backwoods persona. The scene comes about 3 minutes into this clip.

                                          Skip to the three-minute mark for the prestidigitation scene.

Sidenote: I later found out that Hans Conreid - the wonderful actor playing Thimblerig in the Davy Crockett movie - was also the voice and physical inspiration for Captain Hook in Disney's "Peter Pan." It's funny to see Conried's faces and mannerisms in "Davy Crockett" now, and realize how well the Disney animators caricatured the man in their rendering of the debonair pirate captain.

 

 The resemblance is wonderful.

Sidenote 2: "Sleight-of-hand" is pronounced as "slight of hand," not "slate of hand." So don't mispronounce it at future cocktail parties!

One of my favorite things about blogging so far is that it gives me a channel to share my memories while exploring words - like these random childhood memories of dialogue in "Davy Crockett", which I must have watched dozens of times growing up. In a different medium, or in person, it just wouldn't be the same. So thanks for reading, and subscribe below!