The Power of Words (and Why “Witch” Still Matters)

Words have always had power.

They can build or break. Heal or harm. Bless or curse.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how we wield them. How in the right hands, words can save a life, and in the wrong ones, they can destroy one.

I saw it recently in the digital age’s modern “public square.” Someone shared something unbearably painful online, and instead of meeting her with compassion, people met her with cruelty. They dissected her pain, questioned her story, told her what she should have done differently.

All of it with words.

That’s the thing, we don’t need pitchforks anymore. We just need comment sections.

And that word witch? It still echoes through time.

We don’t hang women for being “witches” anymore; we just shame them until they go quiet.

Witch.

The Oxford Dictionary defines witch as both:

A person thought to have magic powers, especially evil ones,
popularly depicted as a woman wearing a black cloak and pointed hat and flying on a broomstick.

Derogatory word for an ugly or unpleasant woman.

Witch.

In practice, it’s what we’ve always called women who made others uncomfortable. Women who spoke too loudly, felt too deeply, or refused to bend.

Once, being called a “witch” justified a public burning at the stake —
or in Salem, a hanging. Now, it shows up as “attention-seeking,” “crazy,” “dramatic,” “too much.” The spell changes form; but the magic, and the danger, stay the same.

In my next book, Daughter of the Gallows, I’ve been writing about that word. How it was used to silence, to shame, to make women doubt their own truth.

But also how it can be reclaimed.

That is the beautiful thing about words. They don’t just destroy. They can also be reclaimed and rewritten.

The older I get, the more I believe in that kind of alchemy. The magic of saying what’s true even when your voice shakes. Of using language not to condemn, but to connect. Of reclaiming a word that was used to shame, to separate, and instead using it to unite.

Words are powerful. In the right hands, words can change the world or save a life.

Because when someone is standing on the edge — whether it’s a gallows or a comment thread — the right word can still save them.

And maybe that’s what finding my voice has always been about. Not learning to shout over the noise, but remembering the quiet, steady magic in language itself. The kind of magic that turns pain into truth, truth into story, and story into survival.

That’s what witches have always done, isn’t it? Taken what was meant to destroy them and turned it into light. Ground the stones thrown at them into pigment, and painted a world where voice is no longer a crime.

Maybe that’s the kind of witch I want to be — the kind who keeps speaking, even when the world tells her to burn.