April 3, 2024 • 11 mins
What's the deal with knocking on wood? It's an action one takes to ensure good luck. Which doesn't exist. Yet we do it. Humans are funny that way.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Oh no, I was just wishing myself good luck.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Oh well that should sound like this.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
We're talking about knocking on wood, and it's actually not
for good luck. Knocking on wood is more to avoid
tempting fate.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
It depends on who you're talking to. Are you an
ancient celt or a modern day Chuck.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I'm a modern day Kilt.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Oh god, no, no, no, I'm an ancient Chuck.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
That's what I am.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Thanks, you're going so great for this podcast. Nothing will
ever stop it from being successful.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, Emily always says she's very a big wood knocker,
so she's always like, you better find some wood to knock.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah, you can't. You can't mess around with like plastic
or metal.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
It has to be fake wood even.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
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
(01:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
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
(02:27):
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
(02:47):
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
(03:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, they went to some effort to secure their good
luck or stave off the bad luck.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
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,
(03:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
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
(04:34):
you were safe from being tagged it.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
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
(04:56):
came from that. It's as recent as one hundred or
so years ago.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
I like that one. I'm going to start doing that.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
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?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Sure? No, sevision, No.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
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
(06:18):
waved off my envy.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Okay, what culture is at grease?
Speaker 1 (06:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, I've also seen spitting over your shoulder, which that's hard.
That is hard. I mean you can sort of spit, just.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Spit right on your shoulders. I do.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
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
(07:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Do it like bew York even though she's Icelandic. I
think it'll.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Cover Oh man, I wish I could do be York.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
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
(08:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
That's got to work really well.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
I don't. It doesn't really always.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
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
(09:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Oh yeah, yeah, nice out.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Well, what about Thailand? This is interesting?
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, why don't you take it? All right?
Speaker 2 (10:07):
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,
(10:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah, pretty great?
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Huh sure, why not?
Speaker 1 (10:50):
I don't have anything else? Do you have anything else?
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Well, Chuck, I wish you the best of luck in
all of your endeavors.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Right back at you, I hold my penis amulet up
in your honor.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Thank you same to you. That means, of course, short
stuff is that.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Oh no, I was just wishing myself good luck.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Oh well that should sound like this.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
We're talking about knocking on wood, and it's actually not
for good luck. Knocking on wood is more to avoid
tempting fate.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
It depends on who you're talking to. Are you an
ancient celt or a modern day Chuck.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I'm a modern day Kilt.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Oh god, no, no, no, I'm an ancient Chuck.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
That's what I am.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Thanks, you're going so great for this podcast. Nothing will
ever stop it from being successful.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, Emily always says she's very a big wood knocker,
so she's always like, you better find some wood to knock.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah, you can't. You can't mess around with like plastic
or metal.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
It has to be fake wood even.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
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
(01:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
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
(02:27):
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
(02:47):
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
(03:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, they went to some effort to secure their good
luck or stave off the bad luck.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
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,
(03:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
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
(04:34):
you were safe from being tagged it.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
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
(04:56):
came from that. It's as recent as one hundred or
so years ago.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
I like that one. I'm going to start doing that.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
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?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Sure? No, sevision, No.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
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
(06:18):
waved off my envy.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Okay, what culture is at grease?
Speaker 1 (06:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, I've also seen spitting over your shoulder, which that's hard.
That is hard. I mean you can sort of spit, just.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Spit right on your shoulders. I do.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
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
(07:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Do it like bew York even though she's Icelandic. I
think it'll.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Cover Oh man, I wish I could do be York.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
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
(08:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
That's got to work really well.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
I don't. It doesn't really always.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
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
(09:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Oh yeah, yeah, nice out.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Well, what about Thailand? This is interesting?
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, why don't you take it? All right?
Speaker 2 (10:07):
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,
(10:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah, pretty great?
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Huh sure, why not?
Speaker 1 (10:50):
I don't have anything else? Do you have anything else?
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Well, Chuck, I wish you the best of luck in
all of your endeavors.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Right back at you, I hold my penis amulet up
in your honor.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Thank you same to you. That means, of course, short
stuff is that.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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