Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Knock on Wood

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay, and me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck Jerries 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 Celt. Oh, God. No, no, no. I'm an ancient Chuck. That's what I am. My brain's busted now. You're going to have to take over the rest of this episode. Uh, no. 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. Things are 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'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 mess around with like plastic or metal. It has to be wood. Fake wood even, that's even the worst.

Can't even be fake wood? Yeah. So there's been, 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 built your house out of a tree, you may knock on that wood as 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. There was a study, not a great one, but a study from the University of Chicago in 2013 where they would have someone say

something 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 I know of, or just hold onto 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 were 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, Pagan-y explanation than that?

Well, there may be. And the Brits say touch wood instead of knock wood. And apparently there was a game, when was this, like in the 19th 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 are touching wood, then you are safe from being tagged it. Yeah, a folklorist named Steve Roud traced it back

to an 1891 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 a hundred or so years ago. Yeah.

I think if you're in there are variations. If you're in Turkey, you do the knock wood twice, but you also pull on your earlobe one time. I like that one. I'm going to start doing that. And I think in Italy they say touch iron. And people say why? I have no comeback for that. I was trying to start doing that. And the thing in Italy, they say touch iron. And people say why? I have no comeback for that. I was 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 wood. 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.

["Stuff You Should Know"] Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay. And me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share.

Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. 47 years ago on a warm summer's night in Melbourne, Susan Bartlett and Suzanne Armstrong were stabbed to death in their home in Easy Street, Collingwood. Suzanne's 16-month-old son was asleep in his cot at the time. The double homicide left the community shocked and detectives rattled as several promising early leads gradually petered out. No one has ever been charged and critical questions remain unanswered. Did the young women know their killer or did they die in a brutal random attack? Why has their murderer never been found? Journalist Helen Thomas has been investigating Susan and Suzanne's deaths for more than a decade.

Now Helen has delved into the case again for a brand new original podcast made for Casefile Presents. Listen to Casefile Presents The Easy Street Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ["The Last of You Should Know"] 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. I'm jealous of him. 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 that Greece? Greece? Greece, but spitting, it's also big in Jewish culture, t' is a, I think three times usually is the way you do it for good luck or to ward off bad luck 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. You just spit right on your shoulders, what I do. BOWEN I do. BOWEN I've 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, in your little broken dish bin, and you save it till New Year's Eve, and 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 Bjork, even though she's Icelandic.

I think it'll cover. Oh man, I wish I could do Bjork. So yeah, I like that. I also like leaving it as a pile rather 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, 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 of one another to make a symbol of the cross almost. They, 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 1912 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, mwah, mwah, and kiss each one, not each other's. Although, we probably should.

That's gotta work really well. Yeah, I'm not, I mean, I think we got that from, why do I wanna say we got that from a movie? Like, true romance or something, I have no idea. Well, I don't, it doesn't ring a bell. We've 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. 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.

Yeah, I actually adopted that one for our New Year, Western New Year. Oh yeah? Yeah. Nice. Out the back door? I just don't clean for a couple of days. I clean first. And I don't think I was taking it out the back door. 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 how to pronounce, palad kik is how I would say it. 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 carved penises. They're usually pretty small, a 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? Nah. 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 Same to you. That means of course short stuff, is that?

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