Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. Jerry's here again sitting in for Dave and this is short stuff. Come in.
Oh no, I was just wishing myself good luck.
Oh well that should sound like this.
We're talking about knocking on wood, and it's actually not for good luck. Knocking on wood is more to avoid tempting fate.
It depends on who you're talking to. Are you an ancient celt or a modern day Chuck.
I'm a modern day Kilt.
Oh god, no, no, no, I'm an ancient Chuck.
That's what I am.
My brain's busted. Now you're gonna have to take over the rest of this episode, now, all right, So yeah, you're right. These days we knock on wood to ward off bad luck. Usually it's when we're saying something like a boast, or we're saying something that we don't want the opposite to happen.
Thanks, you're going so great for this podcast. Nothing will ever stop it from being successful.
Knock on wood. That's another thing you have to do too. You you're doing it too many times, by the way, you might actually be undoing the charm. I also say knock on wood when I knock on wood, I guess just to double up.
Yeah, Emily always says she's very a big wood knocker, so she's always like, you better find some wood to knock.
Yeah, you can't. You can't mess around with like plastic or metal.
It has to be fake wood even.
Yeah. So the the there's been all like this is just a whole episode on Weird Little Luck Rituals. We talked about throwing salt over your shoulder before, and I think we've talked about knocking on wood at some point before, because it seems familiar that it can be traced back to the ancient Celts and essentially based on their belief that trees, particularly oak trees, harbored spirits and that if you came in contact with the tree, you were coming in contact essentially with the spirits.
Yeah, and trees were a big deal. And you know, if you've built your house out of a tree, you may knock on that wood is sort of saying like, hey, I believe if you'd knocked once it was like hey, thanks for the good luck, and a second knock was
saying like thank you, I guess for your wood. All of these things are action based, though, and there's something around that, like most of these good luck things, like you can't and it's not like good luck is even a real thing anyway, but in order to feel like you're achieving that desired outcome of luck, you can't just think it with kind of any of these things that
we're going to be talking about. And they've even done research that was a study not a great one, but a study from the University of Chicago in twenty thirteen where they would have someone say something that like tempted fate like our podcast will never you know, go down the tubes or whatever, and then you could either knock wood, throw a ball of course, which is not part of any ritual that we that I know of, or just
hold on to a ball. And they found that the people who felt like, all right, I think this worked is the ones who actually did something, whether even if it was throwing the ball, because it was an action.
Yeah, they went to some effort to secure their good luck or stave off the bad luck.
Yeah exactly.
Yeah. So apparently that again people trace this back to the ancient Celts and their love of oak trees and their belief that the spirits are in the oak trees, so I think Also one of the things I saw is that when you knock, you're essentially waking them up, like, wake up, spirits, I need your help to secure this good luck. Pretty interesting. And then other people are like, no, you're knocking to basically to make a sound over your talking,
so the bad spirits can't hear you. That makes a lot of sense too, But also, isn't it a little too neat? Isn't it a little too tidy? Doesn't it seem like there would be a much more recent, much less Celtic pagany explanation than that.
Well there may be in the Brits, say touchwood instead of knockwood, and apparently that was a game when was this like the night in the nineteenth century, so much more recent called tig touch wood. I've also seen tiggy touch wood where it's basically tag where different trees are assigned as bases, and if you were touching wood then you were safe from being tagged it.
Yeah. A folklorist named Steve Rowd traced it back to an eighteen ninety one book called The Boy's Modern Playmate. That's fun sure, So yeah, he thinks that this is actually where this idea of touching wood and being safe and then eventually evolving into knocking wood for good luck came from that. It's as recent as one hundred or so years ago.
Yeah, I think if you're in their variations, if you're in Turkey, you do the knock wood twice, but you also pull on your ear lobe one time.
I like that one. I'm going to start doing that.
And I thing in Italy they say touch iron, and people say why, I have no comeback for that, trying to think of something Italian.
There's nothing to say other than because there's no good answer. They're supposed to be touching what they just have it wrong. Essentially, Sorry Italy, I say we take a break and come back and talk about some other lucky practices around the world. How about that?
Sure? No, sevision, No.
Okay, Chuck. Let's say that we're in Greece and I've seen you across the street and I'm like, that guy looks really good in those pants, so I'm jealous of them. You might look over and see me go and like kind of wave my hand at you, And what I've just done is basically given you the evil eye of envy, and so to erase that I've spat three times and waved off my envy.
Okay, what culture is at grease?
Grease? But spitting it's also big in Jewish culture too, too, is I think three times usually is the way you do it for good luck or to ward off bad luck more more usually.
Yeah, I've also seen spitting over your shoulder, which that's hard. That is hard. I mean you can sort of spit, just.
Spit right on your shoulders. I do.
I got one Denmark. This is very interesting. They save their broken dishes. I like sort of elaborate ones like these. So if you break a dish in Denmark, you just save it all year long and you collect it, I guess, and your little broken dish bin, and you save it till New Year's Eve. And they will they will chuck their broken plates toward people that they want to have good luck, toward their houses, like a friend or a
family or whatever, to wish them good luck. And I think the children can even just leave a little pile on their friend's doorstep if they want them to, like, instead of throwing it, they can just say, like, I don't even know how to do a Danish accent, but here's a little pile of broken dishes.
Do it like bew York even though she's Icelandic. I think it'll.
Cover Oh man, I wish I could do be York.
So yeah, I like that. I also like leaving it as a pile, whether than throwing your broken dishes at someone's house because somebody's got to clean that up. Yeah. One of my favorites is crossing fingers. Like, not only do I like to cross fingers myself, I like using the emoji crossing fingers is huge with me.
Yeah.
You would think that it probably dates back quite a ways, and there's a story that it actually was originated by the early Christians who were persecuted by the Romans at the time, so they would cross fingers to basically signify it at one another, to make a symbol of the cross, almost like hey, I'm with you, buddy, I'm a Christian. And I read I think in an Oxford explanatory article on that that basically this is how they put it.
So they found that they can only date it back to nineteen twelve and said given its late appearance, restricted distribution most of the UK and colonies, and the fact that crossed fingers bear no relation to the shape of a cross. This explanation is completely unfounded.
My buddy Brett and I have always done we go double hope hope, and we each cross both of our fingers. I go and kiss each one, not each other's. Wow, though we probably should.
That's got to work really well.
Yeah, I'm not. I mean, I think we got that from Why do I want to say we got that from a movie like True Romance or something. I have no idea.
I don't. It doesn't really always.
Done it, so I have no idea where it came from. I know. In China, what they do is they believe that your good luck comes through the front of the house. Yes, and so before Chinese New Year, which is not the same as our New Year, they clean their houses. But they don't sweep out the dirt or the quote unquote bad They sweep it all in in a little pile and they collect it because they have to put it
out the back door. You never want to if you want to bring in good luck, you don't want to sweep that stuff out of the front door.
Yeah, and then you don't do any cleaning at all. The first couple of days after Chinese New Year because you're letting that good luck accumulate, you know. Yeah, I actually adopted that one for our New Year Western New Year.
Oh yeah, yeah, nice out.
The bront door. I just don't clean for a couple of days. I cleaned first, and I don't think I was ticking out the back door, but the side door, I guess counts. It's not the front door, all right. But then after, like so New Year's Eve you can do that, but on New Year's Day there's no cleaning or anything like that.
Well, what about Thailand? This is interesting?
Yeah, why don't you take it? All right?
Little boys and men in Thailand think that if you wear I'm not sure what's to pronounced palade kiek is how I would say it, p l A p A l A d k h i k, which is a penis amulet. If you wear that in your pants, then that's going to bring you luck. And this is just a you know, it's a little If you look them up, they look like very ornate of different design, but they're
all different versions of little car penises. They're usually pretty small couple of inches, and they think that that will bring you good luck and lessen like the severity of an injury maybe, and I think just overall good luck.
Yeah, pretty great?
Huh sure, why not?
I don't have anything else? Do you have anything else?
Yeah?
Well, Chuck, I wish you the best of luck in all of your endeavors.
Right back at you, I hold my penis amulet up in your honor.
Thank you same to you. That means, of course, short stuff is that.
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