T • "Use the magic words: please, thank you, and you're welcome." -- Michael Jay Goldberh, The 9 Ways of Working (1996) Therefore In Literature: • "'Therefore,' approximately in the sense of 'Abracadabra' or 'Open Sesame.'" -- Roger Kimball, The Rape of the Masters (2004) There's No Place Like Home (see also home) Dorothy returns to Kansas by repeating a magical phrase: "There's no place like home." -- TheFreeLibrary.com, "L. Frank Baum" (2004) Mystique: "Jesse Stewart, author of Secrets of the Yellow Brick Road feels [There's no place like home] is a difficult phrase to describe or understand with our limited vocabulary. It points to something that transcends ordinary experience so that it can only be alluded to with words, yet not fully recognized until experienced, unless you are already there."16 Meanings: The "magical incantation"17 There's no place like home, chanted "three times while she clicks together heels gripped by hard-won ruby slip pers, returns Dorothy home from her nightmare-dream in the land of Oz. On its face, the phrase expresses a heartfelt home-yearning, as in 'There's no place like home, [sigh].' Here the phrase suggests that home is so unique, wonderful, and irreplaceable a place (a 'place where people know me, where I can just be,' in Minnie Bruce Pratt's phrasing), that no other place ever lives up to it. However, the selfsame phrase unmasks this yearning for home as a fantasy. Switch the emphasis to 'There's no place like home,' and the phrase now seems to suggest that there is no place as wonderful as home is mytholo gized to be, and that includes home itself. The uncanny, punlike character of the phrase combines an unrelenting yearning for home together with an awareness that the home so yearned for is a fantasy."18 Origins: There's No Place Like Home was coined by playwright John Howard Payne (d. 1852) in his song "Home Sweet Home." The song's "best-known phrase, 'There's no place like home,' served as a talisman for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Perhaps Americans were so sentimental about home because 16 Judy Kennedy, Beyond the Rainbow (2004) 17 Lizbeth Goodman, Literature and Gender (1996) 18 Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (2001)