I was performing a card routine at a private corporate function in Salzburg — an after-dinner thing, close-up, small groups rotating through. The kind of gig where you do the same set eight or nine times in an evening. By the sixth group, the routine was on autopilot, and a woman in her fifties who had been watching with polite interest said something that derailed me completely.
She leaned toward the person next to her and whispered — but loud enough for me to catch it — “What’s a riffle?”
I had just said something like “I’ll riffle through the cards and you tell me when to stop.” To me, “riffle” was a perfectly ordinary word. It described exactly what I was doing. I used it several times a night. I had probably used it thousands of times in practice. It was part of my vocabulary the way “spreadsheet” is part of a consultant’s vocabulary.
But she did not know what it meant. And if she did not know, how many other people over how many other performances had been momentarily confused by a word I used without thinking? How many tiny moments of disconnection had I created because I was speaking a language my audience did not share?
That incident in Salzburg set off a purge. I went through every routine I performed and hunted for words that belonged to the world of magic rather than the world of normal human conversation. The list was longer than I expected. Much longer.
The Jargon Problem
Ken Weber dedicates a significant section of Maximum Entertainment to words and phrases that performers should eliminate. When I first encountered his list, I thought most of it was obvious. Of course you would not use obscure technical language with a lay audience. That seemed like basic communication sense.
Then I checked my own scripts. And I discovered that “basic communication sense” had been failing me in ways I could not see until someone pointed them out.
Take the word “silk.” In magic, a silk is a specific thing — a lightweight, colorful cloth used in a variety of effects. Every performer knows the word. It shows up in product descriptions, tutorial videos, and conversation between magicians. It is so embedded in the vocabulary that it stops sounding like jargon and starts sounding like… just a word.
But to a normal person, “silk” is a fabric. If you say “I have a silk here,” a normal person thinks you are talking about a type of material, not a specific prop. They might wonder why you are specifying the fabric content of your handkerchief. The word carries no meaning for them. It is noise.
The fix is simple: say “cloth” or “handkerchief.” These are words that everyone understands. They describe what the object actually looks like to the audience, not what it is called in the performer’s private lexicon.
Or take “die.” In magic, “die” is the singular of “dice.” Technically this is correct English. Technically, one die, two dice. But nobody talks like that anymore. If you hand someone a single red cube with dots on it and call it “a die,” they will process the word, figure out what you mean, and move on. But that moment of processing — that half-second of cognitive effort — is a half-second where they are thinking about language instead of thinking about magic.
Just say “dice.” Everyone knows what dice means. Nobody cares about the grammatical distinction between singular and plural. Your audience is not here for a grammar lesson.
“Effect” is another one. Performers use it constantly. “For my next effect…” But “effect” is not a word that normal people associate with entertainment. It is a word from science, medicine, or policy. If you say “effect” to a layperson, they are not thinking about magic. They are thinking about side effects, or cause and effect, or special effects. The word does not land the way you think it does.
And “bit.” I used to refer to sections of my act as “bits.” I picked this up from watching behind-the-scenes content — magicians and comedians referring to their “bits.” But Weber flags this precisely: “bit” connotes low-end showbiz. It makes what you do sound small, trivial, disposable. A bit is something a street busker does between hat passes. If what you are performing has been scripted, rehearsed, and refined, it deserves a better word than “bit.” Call it a piece. Call it a routine. Call it a moment. Just do not call it a bit.
The Weakness of “Try”
Of all the words Weber identifies, the one that hit me hardest was “try.”
“Let’s try this.”
“I’m going to try to read your mind.”
“Let’s try an experiment.”
I used “try” constantly. It felt like a natural, conversational way to introduce what I was about to do. It felt humble. It felt like I was bringing the audience along with me rather than dictating to them.
What it actually did was undermine every shred of confidence I had been building.
Weber’s point is blunt: “try” is weak and flaccid. It signals uncertainty. It tells the audience that the person in front of them is not sure whether what they are about to do will work. And if the performer is not sure, why should the audience care? Why should they invest emotionally in an outcome that even the performer is hedging on?
There is a famous line that Weber quotes — Yoda’s instruction from Star Wars: “Do or do not. There is no try.” It sounds like a movie cliché, but as a performance principle, it is precise. When you say “Let’s try this,” you are giving yourself an escape hatch. If it fails, well, you only said you would try. But that escape hatch costs you the audience’s belief. They are not watching someone with extraordinary abilities. They are watching someone who might or might not pull something off. The dynamic shifts from astonishment to suspense about competence, and those are very different emotional experiences.
Now, Weber does note an exception. If you are performing mentalism or an escape, you might deliberately want to introduce doubt about the outcome. A mentalist saying “I’m not sure this will work” can actually heighten tension, because the premise of mentalism often involves genuine uncertainty about whether the performer’s abilities will come through. But this is a strategic choice, not a verbal tic. It is doubt deployed with intention, not doubt that leaks out because you have not thought about your word choice.
For me, “try” was always a leak. I was not deliberately creating tension. I was unconsciously hedging.
The Condescension Trap
Another category of words that needed purging were the ones I did not realize were condescending.
“That’s fantastic!”
I used to say this after a volunteer did something simple — picked a card, wrote down a number, chose an envelope. They would make their selection, and I would respond with “That’s fantastic!” or “Brilliant!” or “Perfect!” as if they had just solved a differential equation rather than pointing at a card.
Weber identifies this precisely: responding to a simple request with excessive praise is condescending. The spectator knows they did not do anything remarkable. They picked a card. Telling them that is “fantastic” does not make them feel good. It makes them feel like you are performing a script rather than having a genuine interaction. It is the verbal equivalent of a kindergarten teacher praising a child for tying their shoes — appropriate for a five-year-old, patronizing for an adult.
The fix is not to say nothing. It is to respond proportionally. A nod. A “thank you.” A brief, genuine acknowledgment. Save your enthusiasm for moments that actually warrant it.
Similarly, “Would you like to change your mind?” is a phrase that has become so embedded in magic performance that it practically comes pre-installed with every card routine. The performer offers a choice, the spectator chooses, and the performer asks if they would like to change their mind.
The question is a cliche at best and slightly insulting at worst. It implies that the spectator might have made the wrong choice, or that their decision needs validation. It is also functionally useless — in most contexts, whether the spectator changes their mind makes no difference to the outcome, and at some level, they sense that. The question is theatrical machinery that has been stripped of its gears. It goes through the motions of fairness without actually being fair.
If you genuinely want to offer a choice, be specific. “You chose the red envelope. You can switch to the blue one if you’d like, or stay with red — entirely up to you.” That is a real offer, stated directly, without the vague haze of “Would you like to change your mind?”
The Obvious-Statement Problem
“I have here a deck of cards.”
I have said this. You have heard this. And it is utterly pointless. The audience can see that you are holding a deck of cards. Telling them what they can already see does not add information — it subtracts credibility.
The same applies to “This is an ordinary deck of cards.” Weber is sharp on this point: claiming something is ordinary raises the suspicion that it is not. Before you said “ordinary,” nobody was thinking about whether the cards were special. The word “ordinary” is what plants the question. You are solving a problem that did not exist until you created it.
Props are presumed ordinary until proven otherwise. Your audience starts from a position of trust. When you announce the ordinariness of your props, you erode that trust by suggesting there is something that needs defending.
My Purge Process
After reading Weber’s list and checking it against my own scripts, I developed a systematic approach to cleaning up my language. It is the same kind of process I would use in consulting when reviewing a strategy document for clarity.
First, I recorded three consecutive performances of the same routine and transcribed them. This gave me not just what I planned to say, but what I actually said under performance conditions, including all the verbal debris that accumulates when you are thinking on your feet.
Second, I went through each transcription with a highlighter and marked every word or phrase that fell into one of the categories: jargon that laypeople would not understand, weak words that undercut confidence, condescending responses, obvious statements, and filler that served no purpose.
Third, I replaced each highlighted item with either a better alternative or nothing. Often, nothing was the right choice. The sentence worked better without the problematic word than with any replacement.
The result, after about two weeks of this process, was scripts that were noticeably shorter and significantly cleaner. I had cut between fifteen and twenty percent of the total word count across my performing repertoire — not by removing content, but by removing noise. The content was all still there. It was just no longer buried under a layer of jargon, hedging, and verbal filler.
The Invisible Cost of Every Wrong Word
Here is what makes this work matter, and why I am dedicating the opening posts of this series to something as granular as individual word choice.
Every wrong word costs you something. Not a lot. Not enough to destroy a performance. But a little. A tiny withdrawal from the audience’s bank of attention and trust. A half-second of confusion. A flicker of condescension detected. A moment of uncertainty transmitted. Each one is small. But they accumulate. Over the course of a seven-minute routine, twenty small withdrawals add up to a performance that feels vaguely off without anyone being able to articulate why.
The audience will not leave thinking “He used too much jargon.” They will leave thinking “It was fine, but something was missing.” They will not be able to name the problem. But they will feel it.
Conversely, when every word is pulling its weight, when there is no jargon to translate and no weakness to detect and no condescension to bristle at, the audience’s experience becomes seamless. They are not processing your language. They are simply inside the experience. The words become transparent — which is exactly what words should be. You want the audience to see through the words to the magic, not to see the words themselves.
That is what purging does. It does not make your script flashier. It makes your script invisible. And invisible is exactly right.
The next time you perform, listen to yourself. Not to the routine. Not to the magic. To the words. Every single one. And ask yourself: does this word exist for my audience, or does it exist for me?
If the answer is “for me,” it is time for it to go.