The magic has been emptied.
-local oral tradition
“What’s the infinitive form of that verb?” I asked my local friend.
“Aha! You are smart to look for the infinitives. Once you know the infinitives of our language then the magic has been emptied.”
“Come again?”
This conversation is how I learned this new saying this past week. Essentially, this local idiom can be used for any situation where something previously incomprehensible now suddenly makes sense because you’ve found the key to understanding it. It would be equivalent to our English ‘pulling back the curtain,’ something being ‘unraveled,’ or ‘lifting the veil.’ This idiom seems to reference the universal “so that’s how!” exclamation of understanding when you find out how a magic trick is really done.
My friend was using this idiom to communicate that once a foreigner learns the infinitives of the local language’s verbs, then the whole system of verbs and their many perplexing forms will make so much more sense. Finding keys like this that bring order to a foreign language (or culture) that initially feels like chaos is usually a moment of significant breakthrough for a weary learner. Every language has its own logic, its own keys. Find them and it will be demystified and suddenly logical and accessible. Its ‘magic’ of inaccessible mystery may be emptied, but the magic of getting to understand and use the language well will have just begun.
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Entrusted to the Dirt 