The chant is an incantation, a spell that we cast at aggressors to keep the power of their words at bay. When someone pelts words at us to try to hurt our feelings, we block them with a ritual formula that vows they will never succeed. The powers of language, written or spoken, include rhythm, tone, accent, pitch, and rhyme as well as reason. Much more than a way of describing things and trading information, language is a relationship between people. However routine or perfunctory most everyday contact may be, we touch each other with words.
Some verbal gestures pack a wallop no magic spell can contain.
I learned this one morning in about 1965, when I walked to school like every other day, past the cow paddock and the shops, under the railway bridge and past the prison farm, then up the road dividing the brick of Maitland Girls' High School from the stone of Maitland Gaol. They seemed to be enormous, sky high. As the world froze quietly inside me, I wondered if people could see my name from the main street miles away. Verbally humiliated, I should have been shattered but I wasn't. Maybe all that chanting toughened me up.