Radicalized

How to Break a Word-Curse with a Word-Charm

Storytime

I was in third grade the first time someone called me weird.

It was meant to land like a slap. And it did.

For years after that, I flinched every time I heard that word used near my name. Weird was what you called something broken. Something that didn’t belong. Something you should be ashamed of.

Then one day — I was maybe thirty — someone said it again.

“You’re so weird, Teri.”

And something in me decided to stop apologizing for it and to own it.

“I know,” I said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

I didn’t argue with the word. I didn’t correct it. I just picked it up, turned it over in my hands, and decided it was mine now. Then I looked up the etymology of the word, which

I didn’t know at the time that I had stumbled into one of the oldest forms of word-spell work in existence.

This week, watching Tim Walz speak, I saw someone do it on a stage in front of thousands of people.

And I need to show you exactly how he did it — letter by letter.

The Lesson: The R Reversal Spell

“They call us radicals. You’re damn right we’ve been radicalized.”

Let’s start with R.

R is the growl letter. The motor letter. The sound your engine makes when it refuses to stop. Say it slowly, all by itself: rrrrrr. Feel it vibrate in the back of your throat. Feel it rumble in your chest.

R is momentum that cannot be reversed.

Now say RAD out loud.
RAD means COOL, AWESOME, AMAZING. Yup, let’s own that.

Rad. That’s R’s unstoppable growl slamming into D — the most declarative, definitive, done sound in the English language. D is a door closing. A gavel landing. A period at the end of a sentence that will not negotiate.

RAD is momentum that has made up its mind.

When Walz said “You’re damn right we’ve been radicalized,” he wasn’t defending against the word. He was claiming its engine. He took the growl, the momentum, the decisive D — and he kept it.

Then he did something extraordinary.

He said it five times.

“They call us radicals. You’re damn right we’ve been radicalized — radicalized by compassion, radicalized by decency, radicalized by due process, radicalized by democracy.”

Instead of arguing with the word radicalized, he owned it and claimed its power.

Five times he repeated it, like an incantation, the refrain of a resistance song. He took a word designed to frighten and filled it with the gentlest, most principled values in human civic life.

By the fifth repetition the word didn’t mean what it meant before.

That is how you break a curse. You alchemize it. 💜

And every single time he said it, he hitched that R-D engine to a completely different kind of word:

Compassion. Decency. Due process. Democracy.

Say those words slowly. Notice what they’re made of. They begin with strong declarative C and D, and then they flow into full of soft sounds and open vowels. They breathe. They are rounded and unhurried — the sonic opposite of the hard snap of RAD.

Here’s what I see synesthetically when that speech washes over me:

RADICALIZED appears as a sharp, fast, silver blade.

...by compassion turns that blade into a river.

By the fifth repetition, the blade and the river have become the same thing. The word radicalized has been completely alchemized. It no longer carries its original charge. It has been emptied of fear and refilled — five times over — with the gentlest values in civic life.

PLUS

The word radical comes from the Latin radix — root. A radicle is the first tiny root that cracks open a seed and reaches into the dark earth before anything else can grow. To be radical is to go to the root. To be radicalized is to become rooted.

Rooted by compassion. Rooted by decency. Rooted by democracy.

They threw a word at Walz meaning dangerous. But the word itself remembered what it used to mean. And so did he.

That is a reversal spell.

And you can cast one too.

The Homework: Reclaim Your Word

Think of a word that has been used against you.

Maybe it’s sensitive. Maybe it’s difficult. Maybe it’s too much or too intense or too loud.

Here’s your spell:

Step 1. Say the word out loud. Don’t flinch. Just listen to it. What does it actually feel like in your mouth? What letters is it made of? What’s the energy of those sounds?

Step 2. Own the engine. Say: “You’re right. I have been [word].”

Step 3. Fill it. Repeat the word five times, each time followed by something true and good:

Radicalized by compassion. Sensitive to beauty. Difficult about my own dignity. Too much for people who aren’t enough.

Step 4. Say the word one final time — alone — and notice that it doesn’t feel the same as it did at the start.

I’d love to hear what curses you are breaking with word-charms

That’s what happens when you put new information inside an old container often enough — the container changes.

A curse is just a spell that someone else cast first.

You are always allowed to cast the next one.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh💜

If a word winked at you today — if something here shimmered, shifted, or cast a little spell — buy me a coffee and keep the cauldron bubbling. ☕🔮