WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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"Eye of newt, toe of frog,
wool of bat, and tongue of dog."

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Those are four of the ingredients used
by the witches in Shakespeare's ... Scottish play.

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See, the thing is, I am currently very much on the stage,
on a set, here at the Warner Brothers Studio tour.

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This is the potions classroom from Harry Potter.

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and well, it's considered extremely bad luck to use
'that word', 'that name', on an actual set.

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It is said that Shakespeare used an actual witches brew

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and witches suitably angered by that
placed a curse on the play, or on him

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or, if you believe it, on anyone who said that word.

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and the result is that saying "M...th" here,
is considered a very bad idea

10
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but did you ever think about that.
That doesn't really make sense

11
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I mean, not the curse part.
That obviously doesn't make sense

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but the fact that witches would use eye of newt.

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Witches, the cunning folk,
as they were called, the herbalists.

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They didn't get newts and cut out bits of their eyes
and put them in a potion.

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That doesn't make any sense.

16
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Actually, they used herbs and botanicals,
and that's what "eye of newt" actually was.

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"Eye of newt" is just a code word
for something much more innocuous.

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and there are any number of reasons why
that might have been. The true reason is lost to history

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It could have been a code word, designed
to keep magic within the... well, the "magic circle".

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Or it might just have been
a dialectal thing, we don't know

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but what we do know, "eye of newt"
was actually just mustard seed,

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something warm and calming to add to a healing broth,

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something you might not have known.

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STUPIFY!

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EXPELLIARMUS!

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...amateurs.

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I'm currently at the Harry Potter Studios tour

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and this is most definitely a sound stage, which means
it would be very bad luck... for me to say... the

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...hi.