#KNOCK ON WOOD FULL#

After all, the saying knock on wood has a Catholic connection to the holy rosary and to the Cross.

#KNOCK ON WOOD FULL#

Knocking on wood may seem trivial, but it is one small way people quell their fears in a life full of anxieties. Knock on wood, here’s hoping Mary’s intercession through all those rosaries said during the month will help bring peace and healing to our world. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski has a theory about such actions, called the “ anxiety-ritual theory.” It states that the anxiety created by uncertainty leads people to turn to magic and ritual to gain a sense of control. That puts knocking on wood in a category with other “conversion rituals” like throwing salt over one’s shoulder: actions people perform, almost automatically, to “undo” any bad luck just created. Still they knock, to avoid negative consequences. The expression is used superstitiously to avert the possibility that something just mentioned (if bad) might not occur, or (if it is a good thing) might occur. But she had to survive, she had to be strong to get out. Sick men came for her, made her hurt, scream, cry. She was sold as a sex toy and used as one for years. I’d wager few, if any, people today think – after saying something that might bring bad luck – “I’d better ask the tree spirits for help!” But Wood is simply incomplete, empty and he thinks that he will stay like that forever, a worthy punishment for his unworthiness. So it’s possible – even likely – that the phrase and the ritual predate its first appearance in print. Knocking on wood (also phrased touching wood) is an apotropaic tradition of literally touching, tapping, or knocking on wood, or merely stating that one is. Of course, much folklore is learned informally, by word of mouth or customary behavior.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the phrase “touch wood” only back to the early 19th century, locating its origins in a British children’s tag game called Tiggy-touch-wood, in which children could make themselves “exempt…from capture touching wood.” However, no tangible evidence supports these origin stories.

According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, “traditionally, certain trees, such as the oak, ash, hazel, hawthorn and willow, had a sacred significance and thus protective powers.”įurthermore, the theory goes, Christian reformers in Europe may have deliberately transformed this heathenish belief into a more acceptable Christian one by introducing the idea that the “wood” in “knock on wood” referred to the wood of the cross of Jesus’ crucifixion.