Expelliarmus!

To the average tourist, Nashville, Tennessee, means rye whisky, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and a hundred other names from the hall of fame of American music — blues, country, folk, rock, the lot. To that august list, the occult tourist may now add the name of the hitherto obscure Rev Dan Reehill.

On the advice of exorcists, this school priest in Nashville has banned librarians from issuing Harry Potter books to students, fearing that the young wizard’s spells are genuine and can cause real manifestations in the space-time continuum. Such is the power of the internet, that it has transmitted his bizarre story far and wide in a single day.

Reehill could have done it much easier and saved everyone a load of bother by simply yelling Potter’s most useful spell: “Expelliarmus!” There, we’ve gone and uttered it, the word that literally says “expel arms” in a fancy sort of way, disarming opponents. And it has had absolutely no effect on the ongoing arms race. No wonder Reehill didn’t use it.

We’re treading on eggshells here, but JK Rowling’s spells are just dog Latin — classical-sounding constructions of English words, an engaging conceit that school students, bored to death of amo-amas-amat (concerning love) and leo-leonis (concerning lions), have used for generations to revenge themselves on their teachers.

Outside the Potterverse, a good Latin declension like dominus-domini (concerning the boss) is more likely to reduce minds to pulp than plain expelliarmus. Declensions are nine words longer and have a hypnotic, chant-like quality. In the old days, Reehill and his exorcists would have been subjected to such things in the course of their education, and would have sought refuge in dog Latin. But now that Latin is really a dead language, they only have the fear of the unknown.