Word Magic
On word magic, hidden meanings, and what it means to conduct your own energy
I’ve been sitting with a thought for a few years now, and I need to do something with it.
It started with a poem — Secret Spells of the English Language by the American poet Laurel Airica. The first time I heard it, I felt something shift in my brain. She laid out, with devastating elegance, how many of the words and phrases we use every day carry a second, darker meaning underneath the surface. Words we reach for without thinking. Words that, if you slow down and really listen, tell a very different story.
We wake up each morning. To wake is what we do at a funeral. Mourning is grief. We go to our job. In the Bible, Job is a story about suffering. We collect our earnings. An urn is what holds the ashes of someone who died.
She goes on. The days of the week — the daze of the weak. The weekend — the end of strength.
I don’t share this to be sinister. I share it because I think it matters, deeply, that we pay attention to the words moving through us. Especially as singers. Especially as people who have been silenced.
Word Magic Is Real
What Laurel Airica was pointing to, I’ve since learned, has a name in philosophy: sophistry. It’s the art of shifting words just enough to change their meaning while keeping the surface intact. A manipulative tactic hidden inside perfectly reasonable-sounding language.
The South I grew up in was full of it. Bless your heart. Said sweetly, with a smile. It sounds like warmth. It is not warmth. The whole maneuver depends on your not knowing the code — and on the social contract that keeps you from calling it out. What did I say? I just said bless your heart.
There are subtler versions everywhere. I can’t thank you enough — which literally means the gratitude is insufficient. Try to relax — trying is the opposite of relaxing. These sentences sound like they mean one thing while quietly meaning another.
Once you start noticing it, you can’t stop.
Raised to the Ground
One of the most striking examples I’ve come across is a word I grew up using without a second thought: raised.
Where were you raised? Normal question. I was raised in Texas. She was raised in Georgia.
Except — and this genuinely unsettled me when I found it — the word raised as a way of describing where you grew up wasn’t always universally used in English. According to my research, it was a term specifically associated with the antebellum South, and it was used for enslaved people.
The word that sounds like it — RAZE — means to destroy a building to the ground before building something new in its place. To raze a city. To burn it down.
Having grown up in the South, I can feel the weight of that. I can see how that word spread until it covered everyone, how it became ordinary, how the original meaning faded while the sound remained. That’s how language works. That’s how power works, too.
The Language of Arrival
There’s a book I read a long time ago that took this even further — into territory that, honestly, I’m still not sure what to do with. It looked at the language of birth. Every word in the birthing process. And the author connected each one to maritime law.
Follow me here, because this is wild.
A birth certificate — in the maritime shipping industry, a berth is a sleeping space on a vessel, and a certificate functions like a manifest, the document that accounts for everything a ship is carrying. Every ship must declare its cargo.
The birthing canal — a canal is where ships come in.
The doctor — the dock is where a ship arrives with its ore (its goods, its cargo).
And the baby? The baby is delivered. Which is, of course, the same word we use when a package arrives at your door. When products are shipped in from somewhere else and handed over.
I’m not making a claim here about what this means or what it was intended to mean. I genuinely don’t know. But I can’t unknow it, either. Because what it points to — at minimum — is how deeply embedded language is in systems of power, commerce, and ownership. How the words we use to describe the most intimate human experiences are borrowed from industries that traffic in things.
We arrive in this world already wrapped in that language. Already named in terms that someone else chose, in a system someone else built.
And then we spend years wondering why we feel like we don’t quite belong to ourselves.
The Conductor
Here’s what brought all of this rushing back to the surface this week.
I’ve been recording warm-up videos for my community, and one of them is called The Conductor. It’s an exercise where you use your hands to direct your own voice the way a conductor leads an orchestra — signaling dynamics, tempo, precision. It works beautifully because vocalists don’t have an instrument to touch. Our hands float free. Putting them in the air and feeling the energy around you while you sing changes everything.
A few hours after recording that video, I heard someone talking about conducting energy — in the physics sense. And I stopped. Because that’s the same word. And it means almost the same thing.
An energy conductor is a material that permits the free flow of electrical charge with minimal resistance. Metals like copper, silver, gold. They don’t generate energy — they allow it to move.
A music conductor stands in front of an orchestra or choir and channels the energy of every musician in the room. Directs it. Shapes it. Minimizes resistance between the musicians and the music.
A train conductor moves something large and powerful along a fixed path.
The same word. The same essential function. The free flow of something — energy, sound, momentum — guided with intention and minimal resistance.
Your Voice Is a Conductor
This is what I want you to sit with.
When you sing — when you really sing, with technique and intention and presence — you are not just making sound. You are conducting your own energy. You are creating conditions for something to flow through you with minimal resistance.
That’s what classical vocal technique is actually teaching. It’s not about sounding pretty. It’s not about performing correctly. It’s about removing the places where energy gets stuck, where the throat tightens, where fear collapses the breath, where shame locks the jaw.
We have so much language around voice that treats it as a performance. As output. As something we produce for other people’s consumption.
But what if your voice is a conductor? A material that, when it’s healthy and free, allows the full current of you to move through it — with minimal resistance?
What would it mean to become more conductive?
What would it mean to stop holding so much in place?
Why Language Matters to Healing
I’ve spent years working with people whose voices went quiet. Trauma does that. Conditioning does that. Silence is often taught, and it is taught through language — through what we’re told we can say and what we can’t, through the double meanings we learn not to question, through the words that sound like one thing and mean another.
Part of healing the voice is learning to hear again. To listen to what we’ve been saying to ourselves without knowing it. To notice where the language we’ve inherited has been working against us.
You need to try harder to relax. Bless your heart. You were raised better than this.
We absorb these things. They settle into the body. And eventually, they show up in the voice — in the places where sound gets small, where breath gets held, where the full note never quite arrives.
The work is to conduct yourself back to yourself.
Journal Prompt: What words do you use about your own voice or body that might carry a hidden meaning you’ve never questioned? Try writing a sentence you say to yourself often, and then break each word apart. What do you actually find there?
If this resonated and you’re ready to go deeper — I work with people 1:1 to untangle exactly this kind of thing: the places where your history lives in your voice, and how to reclaim it. You can book a session at calendly.com/hello-bellapayne/75.
The Healthy Voice Community is where I do this work live, in community — warm-ups, deep dives, songwriting, and real conversation about the nervous system and the voice. Come find us: the-healthy-voice-community.circle.so/untitled-page
Journaling helped me find words for things I couldn’t say. It unsilenced me. 52 weeks of prompts. → Get it — $22: rawveganbella.substack.com/p/unsilenced-a-year-of-journaling-back
The Voice Liberation Method is a self-paced course for people who know their voice has been holding something back — and are ready to find out what.
Seven weeks. Nervous system science. Classical technique. Chakras and Guided Visualization. Hero’s Journey. Trauma-informed somatic work. All in one place.
This isn’t about sounding better. It’s about coming home to the voice that was always yours.
→ Get the VLM for $97: https://the-healthy-voice-community.circle.so/untitled-page-1-e9c083