Elixir and Nixir

Meaning

The contrast ELIXIR/NIXIR is a verbal joke at the expense of impatient or inconstant practitioners. Their expected completion becomes a null result, figured immediately beforehand as a malformed birth. NIXIR is therefore not introduced as a second legitimate product or as the name of a chemical substance. The warning belongs to a passage about restrained reckoning, uncertain timing and the danger of overstepping a limit. The English preserves both capitals and the sound-play instead of translating away the contrast. No decoding of the surrounding number-characters is needed to understand the joke’s force: an apparently small error can undo the anticipated benefit.