by Richard
No, you haven’t entered some sort of time warp and been magically or scientifically transported back in time to those halcyon days of yesterday when it was, in fact, yesterday. Or Friday, whichever you prefer. It’s just that Friday was a significant event and I wanted to talk about it. See, yesterday was Friday the 13th. Boo! Hah, you lived through it. Well, I assume you lived through it and you’re not a bunch of animated corpses sitting around, staring at a flickering computer screen looking for a sale on brains.
Be that as it may, I wanted to talk about bad, bad Leroy Brown. No, strike that. I wanted to talk about bad, bad Friday the 13th. I’m about to throw a couple of big, big words at you. First, the fear of the number 13 is called triskaidekaphobia, from the Greek something meaning something else. Basically it’s known as the fear of what I said. Here’s another big word: paraskevidekatriaphobia, which is a word that means, specifically, fear of Friday the 13th.
Can you say there’s a lot of very strange superstitions out there. I mean fear of a number? Fear of a specific day? That’s just odd.
There’s one theory that the Friday the 13th thingee comes from the conglomeration of two older superstitions; that 13 is an unlucky number and that Friday is an unlucky day. (Obviously, these folks have never heard of the weekend. I mean, how can Friday be bad when it’s the last day of the workweek?)
Superstition (click that link, dude. You won’t regret it.) is a credulous belief in something that’s not based on experience, reason or knowledge. (Oh the places I could go and the people I could irritate if I went where I wanted to go with that one. I’ll not do it.)
I’m pretty sure that all this superstition nonsense came about because bad things happened to people and they remembered that they did something out of the ordinary just before. Of course, that doesn’t include the thousands of times they did the same thing (e.g. spilling salt) and nothing happened. Correlation does not imply causation. Except to the easily bamboozled.
Still, I suppose everyone has some sort of belief in some freaky action at a distance. I mean, I have been known to wear the same thing every football Saturday to ensure my beloved Gators keep winning and, if they don’t, changing to something else to try and bring back the mojo. One thing that’s different, though, is that I know it really doesn’t change anything. I just like to do it.
I’m just glad that I don’t have any debilitating superstitions and that I never will. Knock wood.
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