Friday the Thirteenth - lucky for me because I can recycle an essay I posted a few years ago - even that was recycled from an article I wrote for our community magazine.
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| Don't you just love the Count? |
Heads up all you friggatriskaidekaphobics and paraskevidekatriaphobics: this is Friday the 13.
Triskaidekaphobia means fear of the number 13. It is from the Greek: tris means 3, kai means
‘and’, deka means 10, and phobia means ‘fear’. The word was coined 100 years
ago in 1911. Frigga was the Norse
goddess for whom Friday was named, so add her name to the front and it becomes
fear of Friday the Thirteenth. I won’t begin to decipher the meaning of that
second word; it suffices to say it means the same thing.
In western culture, the number 13 is widely associated with
bad luck. No one wants to live on 13th Avenue, or have an apartment
on the 13th floor. Hotels
also eliminate the 13th floor, but the floor is really there, isn’t
it? It’s just been renumbered. Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose. For
ages the number thirteen was just one of many and had no special significance.
The superstition surrounding 13 seems to have arisen in in
medieval times. It is said that folks
became aware that there were thirteen at the Last Supper, and thereafter tried
to avoid thirteen - not only at a table but everywhere else. Norsemen may tell you that when the
mischievous Loki crashed the party at Valhalla to which Odin had invited eleven
of his closest friends, all Niflheim (that’s Norse for hell) broke loose,
resulting in the death of the beloved Baldur. Another case of thirteen at the
table.
Fear of Friday the Thirteenth, that paraskevidekatriaphobia, is a newer, just as irrational fear. Some point to the fact the Jacques de Molay
and many of his fellow Knights Templar were arrested for heresy on Friday, October
13, 1307, but many other significant events, good or bad, could have taken
place on other Fridays the Thirteenth.
It really seems to be a combination of fear of 13 and the fact that many
people wouldn’t care to start anything on Friday. Actually, neither would I. Not that it really
matters, but starting a job on a Friday seems strange: Monday, with the whole
work week ahead, seems more logical.
Folks don’t usually want to get married, start a business venture, move,
start a trip, or even give birth on a Friday.
“Friday’s child is full of woe.”
There are probably a baker’s dozen of reasons
to admire the number thirteen: a baker’s dozen cookies, or loaves or biscuits,
fits nicely on a baking tray. Thirteen
is a prime number, divisible only by 1 and itself. It is also a Wilson prime and a Fibonacci
number, but that’s more mathematics than we need to know right now. There were thirteen original colonies in our
United States, and thirteen stars and stripes on the flag. We’ve added a star
as each state was admitted to the union, but we’d be down to pinstripes if we
hadn’t kept just the original six white and seven red.
There are thirteen players on a rugby team and
thirteen cards in a suit. At thirteen you become a teenager and can watch all
those PG-13 movies. Wilt Chamberlain,
Shaquille O’Neal, and Dan Marino wore number 13. Alex Rodriguez wears it for
the Yankees. Well, that’s not quite a baker’s dozen reasons, but you get
the idea.
And by the way, it might come in handy to know that for
some obscure reason the first Friday the Thirteenth of any year is also
observed as Blame Someone Else Day. Don’t look at me: I didn’t think of it.
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| And while I'm messin' around in the picture files, I'll tag on this one - one of my favorite old American Express ads. Eddie Arcaro and Wilt Chamberlain - Don't you just love it? |
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