Hexe

Hexe is German for witch, from Old High German hagazussa (hedge-rider, literally 'one who sits on the boundary'). The word came to American English through the Pennsylvania Dutch — German-speaking immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In their dialect, hexe (to hex) meant to practice witchcraft, and a hex was a spell or curse. English borrowed both the verb and the noun.

Pennsylvania Dutch hex culture was real and specific. Powwow doctors (practitioners of folk magic) could hex and unhex. Hex signs — colorful geometric designs painted on barns — are the most visible remnant of this tradition. Whether hex signs were actually meant to ward off evil (as tourists are told) or were purely decorative (as some scholars argue) is debated. The barns are painted either way.

Hex entered mainstream American English in the nineteenth century, first in regional usage, then nationally. 'To hex' someone means to curse them, to bring bad luck. 'A hex' is the curse itself. The word has a lightness that 'curse' does not — a hex is a minor supernatural inconvenience, not a divine judgment. You hex an opponent's free throw. You do not hex someone with a terminal illness. The register is informal.

The word has softened to the point of playfulness. A 'hex' in modern usage is barely supernatural — it is closer to jinx than to curse. Baseball fans hex opposing batters. Friends hex each other's diets. The German witch who rode the hedge between the human world and the spirit world has been domesticated into a sports superstition. The witch is gone. The word is a joke.