Heads up all you friggatriskaidekaphobia and paraskevidekatriaphobics: it's Friday the Thirteenth, and this is an article I did up for a community magazine article and for a blog in 2012. Researching the number 13 was an interesting job. At the time I did the research I didn't recognize that there was a movie Friday the Thirteenth, made in 1980. Who knew?
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, A-Rod, wore 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 the year is also observed as Blame Someone Else Day.
Don’t look at me: I didn’t think of it.
P.S. In searching the
net for pictures to go with my essay, I came upon this electronic version of
an old American Express ad I cut from a magazine and stored in one
of my scrap books years ago. Something about it just struck a chord in
me, and I thought I'd add it here for you to see too.
That's the jockey Willie
Shoemaker, 4 feet 11.5 inches tall, leaning on our No.13, Wilt the Stilt, at 7
feet, 1 inch.
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