Imagine you are a citizen of ancient Greece. You come across a man in the street with the most amazing ability to speak without moving his lips at all. Do you:

A. Go up and give him a dram (the ancient Greek coin) for his efforts?

B. Run away screaming, telling people that an evil spirit is on the loose?

C. Ask him if he knows any magic tricks besides ventriloquism?

ANSWER: B!

In those days in ancient Greece, someone who was taken over by an evil spirit was thought to speak not from their mouth, but from their stomach. They were called engastrimuthos — gaster meaning stomach, and muthos meaning speech — in other words, they were ‘belly speakers’, and were to be avoided at all costs!

When the Romans took the word over, they translated the idea into Latin with the word ventriloquus, which also meant ‘speaking from the stomach’. Of course, by the time English took it over as ‘ventriloquism’, all ideas of evil spirits had disappeared, and it famously became a clever trick. Go on, can you speak from your stomach?!

Meanwhile, we get ‘hey presto!’ from Italian, where presto means ‘quickly’, and a magic ‘spell’ comes from a very old English word meaning ‘to tell’ or ‘recite’ — that’s the root of our ‘spelling’ tests too! Come to think of it, it would be good to have a bit of magical help with those.