Deplorable Word facts for kids
The Deplorable Word is a powerful and scary magical curse from C. S. Lewis's book The Magician's Nephew. When someone speaks this word, it destroys all life on an entire world, except for the person who said it.
What is the Deplorable Word?
In The Magician's Nephew, two children named Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer travel to a silent, empty world called Charn. In a very old, ruined palace, they wake up a powerful queen named Jadis.
Jadis tells the children a shocking story. She explains that she fought a huge civil war against her sister. A civil war is when groups within the same country fight each other. Jadis's armies were losing badly. To avoid losing the war completely, Jadis used the Deplorable Word. Her sister knew Jadis had found this terrible spell, but she never thought Jadis would actually use it.
When Jadis spoke the Deplorable Word, it instantly killed every single living thing on her world. Only Jadis herself survived. She did this to make sure she didn't lose the war to her sister.
Digory and Polly were horrified by Jadis's story. But Jadis felt no sadness or regret for all the people she had killed. She believed that everyone else existed only for her to use.
The old rulers of Jadis's family knew about the Deplorable Word. They knew it was real, but they didn't know the word itself. They had promised that no one in their family would ever try to find out what the word was. But Jadis found it anyway. She said she "learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it."
C. S. Lewis, the author, never wrote down what the Deplorable Word actually was. He also didn't explain what "terrible price" Jadis paid to learn it.
Similar Ideas in Other Stories
Other fantasy books also have powerful, destructive spells or weapons. For example, in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson, there is something called the "Ritual of Desecration." This ritual causes widespread damage and destruction. A land hit by it would take hundreds of years to recover. However, it is not as powerful as the Deplorable Word. It does not kill everyone, like the Deplorable Word does.
