"Eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog."
Those are four of the ingredients used by the witches in Shakespeare's ... Scottish play.
See, the thing is, I am currently very much on the stage, on a set, here at the Warner Brothers Studio tour.
This is the potions classroom from Harry Potter.
and well, it's considered extremely bad luck to use 'that word', 'that name', on an actual set.
It is said that Shakespeare used an actual witches brew
and witches suitably angered by that placed a curse on the play, or on him
or, if you believe it, on anyone who said that word.
and the result is that saying "M...th" here, is considered a very bad idea
but did you ever think about that. That doesn't really make sense
I mean, not the curse part. That obviously doesn't make sense
but the fact that witches would use eye of newt.
Witches, the cunning folk, as they were called, the herbalists.
They didn't get newts and cut out bits of their eyes and put them in a potion.
That doesn't make any sense.
Actually, they used herbs and botanicals, and that's what "eye of newt" actually was.
"Eye of newt" is just a code word for something much more innocuous.
and there are any number of reasons why that might have been. The true reason is lost to history
It could have been a code word, designed to keep magic within the... well, the "magic circle".
Or it might just have been a dialectal thing, we don't know
but what we do know, "eye of newt" was actually just mustard seed,
something warm and calming to add to a healing broth,
something you might not have known.
STUPIFY!
EXPELLIARMUS!
...amateurs.
I'm currently at the Harry Potter Studios tour
and this is most definitely a sound stage, which means it would be very bad luck... for me to say... the
...hi.