V like vanity, blank like verse, net like nothing but.
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Writing is often regarded at first as an instrument of secret and magic power. Traces of this early attitude toward writing can still show etymologically: the Middle Englishgrammaryeor grammar, referring to book-learning, came to mean occult or magical lore, and through one Scottish dialectical form has emerged in our present English vocabulary asglamor(spell-casting power).Glamor girlsare really grammar girls.
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, by Walter J. Ong, Methuen, 1982.