A Discourse on Anagrams as a Part of the Cabala

...[is] a motion into a place, whether you take a Letter in a syllable, or a syllable in a word, or a word in a sentence. The term Handling original: Tractatio pleased Varro Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), a prolific Roman scholar and grammarian., in book IV of On the Latin Language, where he teaches that names are formed from other names for four reasons: by the Removal of Letters, or Addition, and because of their Handling, or Change.

Indeed, Turnebus Adrianus Turnebus (1512–1565), a French classical scholar and famous editor of ancient texts. noticed that in this passage the word "contraction" original: arctationem was read incorrectly. He argues it is actually Handling, which occurs when letters are held as if by hand, and are transposed and cast across here or there.

Cicero writes similarly in On the Orator: The material is in the words, the Handling original: Tractationem is in the arrangement of the words. In that passage, however, others read "attraction," though it makes no sense.

Furthermore, "Barbarism" In classical grammar, a barbarismus is an error in a single word, often involving the mispronunciation or misspelling of a letter.—which is perhaps usually born here from this Handling—is adopted in place of refinement; foreignness in place of elegance; and the meaning itself, because there is none, in place of "energy." To this point I draw what the ingenious Pico della Mirandola Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), an Italian Renaissance philosopher known for his 900 Theses and interest in the Kabbalah. asserts in his Magical Disputations, in Thesis XXI: Barbarous names, and those signifying nothing, have more efficacy. Pico argues that nonsensical or foreign "words of power" are more effective in magic because they are not limited by human logic.