V like vanity, blank like verse, net like nothing but.

Writing is often regarded at first as an instrument of secret and magic power. Traces of this early attitude toward writing can still show etymologically: the Middle English grammarye or grammar, referring to book-learning, came to mean occult or magical lore, and through one Scottish dialectical form has emerged in our present English vocabulary as glamor (spell-casting power). Glamor girls are really grammar girls.

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, by Walter J. Ong, Methuen, 1982.