Someone who performs magic tricks to amuse an audience.
I like to use this word to apply to any craft performed with the hands. To name a few activities these crafts might include writing, piano playing, sculpting, sex, sorting mail, washing dishes, and shelving books. Prestidigitational crafts, all of them capable of producing some sort of magic or amusement.
Once in a while a television or radio commercial will emerge in which the sound of a human being’s fingers typing onto a computer keyboard is featured. I am probably not alone among people who lunge for the off button or the mute button as quickly as my reflexes will get me there. That sound, that frantic kissing sound of fingers pecking at cheap plastic computer keys, would be a suitably cruel noise for me should I end up in a torture chamber or a war prison. I find nothing evocative about the sound of cheap plastic being hammered by finger tips. This differs from the sound of someone writing on paper with pen or pencil, a sound which I think is more elegiac and open to interpretation. I imagine that the hard work of crafting words on paper serves as a theater of what type of words are being written.
Lots of scribbles and cross-outs? Poetry.
Straight paper-filling word spew? Diary.
Carefully paced one-sentence-at-a-time words? Personal letter.
I think my objection to the cheap thrashing sound of computer keys, like the squawks of plastic pink flamingos, reflects my feeling that the removal of the intermediary — the piece of paper — has made words cheap, and even powerless. The ease with which I can type words faster than I could think them brings nothing of substance to the output. The prestidigitational output.
