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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 Kelt or a modern day Chuck?

I'm a modern day Kelt.

Oh, God.

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.

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 Oh, no. 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 a very big wood knocker, so she's always like, You better find some wood to knock.

Yeah, you can't mess around with plastic or metal. It has to be wood.

Or fake wood, even.

That's even the worst. Can't even be fake wood? Yeah. 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 if you built your house out of a tree, you may knock on that wood as saying, Hey, I believe if you knocked once, it was like, Hey, thanks for the good luck. And a second knock was saying, Thank you, I guess, for your wood. But all these things are action-based, though. And there's something around that. Most of these good luck things, 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 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 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 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, 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 the bad luck.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So apparently, again, people trace this back to the ancient Celts and their love of oak trees and their belief that the spirits were in the oak trees. So I think also one of the things I saw is that when you knock, you're essentially we waken 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 it's 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 Keltic pagany explanation than that?

Well, there may be. And the Brits say touch wood instead of knockwood. And apparently, that was a game. When was this? 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 Rauwd traced it back to an 1891 book called The Boys Modern Playmate.

That's fun.

Sure. 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 100 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 come back for that. I was trying to think of something Italian.

There's nothing to say, 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?

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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 wave my hand at you. And what I've just done is basically giving you the evil eye of envy. And so So to erase that, I've spat three times and waved off my envy.

Okay. What culture is that? Greece?

Greece, but spitting, it's also big in Jewish culture. 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 spit.

You just spit right on your shoulder is what I do.

I got one. Denmark. This is very interesting. They save their broken dishes. I like 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. I think the children can even just leave a little pile on their friend's doorstep. If they want them to... Instead of throwing it, they can just say, 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. One of my favorites is crossing fingers. Not only do I like to cross fingers myself, I like using the emoji. Crossing fingers is huge with me. You would think that it probably dates back quite a ways. 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 with one another to make a symbol of the cross almost. 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 cross 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. Although we probably should.

That's got to work really well.

Yeah. 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.

It doesn't ring a bell.

We've always done it, so I have no idea where it came from. It's a good one. 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 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 all the first couple of days after Chinese New Year because you're letting that good luck accumulate. 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 cleaned 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... 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 it's pronounced. Paladkeek, 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. If you look them up, They look like very ornate of different design, but they're all different versions of little carb penises. They're usually pretty small, a couple of inches. They think that that will bring you good luck and lessen the severity of an injury, maybe. I think just overall good luck.

Yeah, pretty great, huh?

Sure. Why not?

I don't have anything else. Do you have anything else? No. 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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