Folklore: Touch Wood?

Subject: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Rt Revd Sir jOhn from Hull
Date: 06 Oct 04 - 06:45 PM

Waht do people say it for?
ie they say stuff like "I never been run over yet, touch wood"
or "I never been eaten by a tiger yet, touch wood"
why touching a piece of wood can stop bad things happen to you?
wahts the history to it etc?

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 06 Oct 04 - 07:11 PM

In the States we say Knock on wood - and you do. If there is no wood within reach you knock on your head, ha ha. There is a great scene in Casablanca where Sam plays Knock on Wood (Now who's happy? We're all happy! and so on) so it predates that movie... that is all I know about its history. But it reminds me of the African and Jewish(and other cultures') "superstition" that if you say things are going well, they will immediately get worse. Where I grew up if someone said How are you (Ça va?) you'd say Barely OK (un peu), never Fine (oui, ça va). And you never commented on how nice the weather was. Same superstition but without the wood...

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 06 Oct 04 - 07:52 PM

Originally, touching a fragment of the Holy Cross for luck/protection.
Unfortunately, if all the portions of the Holy Cross were re-united the cross thus formed would be Ginormous!
There again there was that episode with the loaves & fishes!

Nigel

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: GUEST,Anne Croucher
Date: 06 Oct 04 - 08:12 PM

I think it goes back a bit further than Christianity.

Anne

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 06 Oct 04 - 08:27 PM

Different types of trees had different 'magical' properties, some of these date back to Greek/Roman myths, some are 'Celtic/pagan' in origin
.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 06 Oct 04 - 08:44 PM

Mostly to avoid misfortune caused by untimely boasting or self-congratulation (OED). Now often used more widely.
Earliest quote 17th century.
Latin: absit Omen! (far be that omen from us!)
I can see where this request can spawn reams of useless speculation.

Touching a piece of the "true cross" to receive a blessing may or may not have anything to do with the saying.

Digression- Among the Irish, when one says a person is touching wood, it means that the person is close to being encoffined.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 06 Oct 04 - 09:55 PM

So one is 'touching wood' to avert death...

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 06 Oct 04 - 10:21 PM

The Irish expression- When one is dead, one is touching wood- the coffin enclosing the body. So 'touching wood' means one is not long for this world.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Cluin
Date: 06 Oct 04 - 10:58 PM

Whereas to "touch cloth" means a really loud long fart. The left hemorrhoid is flapping in the wind and is perhaps not long for this world.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: JennieG
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 12:31 AM

Rabbi Brasch, a man who has researched the origins of just about everything you could think of and then written books about it, may have mentioned it. If I think of it when I go back to work next week (on hols now) I'll look it up. We have some of his books in the library where I work.

Cheers
JennieG in sunny Sydney

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 12:33 AM

I always thought that 'touching cloth' was the immediate and urgent desire to use the little girls/boys room for a 'number two', as in "hurry up in there, I'm touching cloth here!" Ripping Calico was the loud, conversation stopping fart, from the sound of tearing fabric, calico being a tough cotton fabric that doesn't rip too easily.

Touching wood does indeed predate Christianity. It's connected with the various trees sacred to the old gods, usually oak or yew. To 'touch' those woods was to invoke those gods to prevent the accident you had just mentioned.

It's getting harder and harder to find proper wood to touch these days. Somehow, 'touch chipboard' or 'touch MDF' doesn't have the same ring to it....

And yes, if all the pieces of the "true Cross" were put together, they'd make a wooden church the size of Salisbury Cathedral.

LTS

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Azizi
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 01:01 AM

I believe that this speaks to the subject of "knocking on wood" as a protection from bad things happening:

Janheinz John's book "Muntu" {USA, Faber & Faber, 1961 American edition; pps 99-102) speaks about the high regard traditional African philosophy has for trees {wood}.

In summary, John describes four categories that the Bantu use:
I.   Muntu: forces endowed with intelligence, including the Supreme
            God, spirits, living people, deceased people,and trees
            {plural Bantu}
II. Kintu: thing, including plants, animals, minerals, tools, etc.
            {plural: Bintu}
III. Hantu: place & time
IV. Kuntu: modality {forces such as Joy, Sorrow, Beauty}

"All being, all essence, in whatever form it is conceived, can be subsumed under one of these categories. Nothing can be conceived outside of them...The relationship of all these forces is expressed by their very names, for if we remove the determinative the stem NTU is the same for all the categories....

NTU is the universal force as such which, however, never occurs apart from its manifestations: Muntu, Kintu, Hantu,and Kuntu....

..plants, animals, minerals etc are all Bintu, as the plural of Kintu is expressed. None of these bintu have any will of their own, unless, like animals, they are given a drive by the command of the Bon Dieu. The bintu are 'frozen' forces, which await the command of a Muntu. They stand at the disposal of muntu, or 'at hand' for him. The only exceptions are certain trees,which like poteau-mitan in Voodoo are the 'sreets of the loas' *. In them the water of the depths, the primal Nommo, the word of the ancestors, surges up spontaneously; they are the road traveled by the dead, the loas, to living men; they are the repository of the deified. In many Bantu languages, therefore, trees belong, linguistically, in the Muntu class. Yet when a sacrifice is made to a 'tree', it is never the plant for whom the sarifice is meant, but the loas or ancestors, that is,the Muntu forces, that are journeying along it. As part of such trees, the wood from which sculptures are carved also have a special quality; the Nommo of the ancestors has given it a special consecration."
---
* "loa"=spirit; also same as "orisa" {orisha}

Note also that musical instruments made out of wood such as drums, marimbas {thumb pianos} and balafons {wooden xylophones} are traditionally also considered sacred,living beings, and roads to the spirits.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: open mike
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 01:36 AM

what's MDF:?
granted it is getting ever more difficult to find
"ACTUAL" wood, as opposed to veneer, formica,
and artificial wood products...perhaps that is
where the good furtune lies..if you are lucky
enough to be near soemthing that actually came
from a tree, that , in itself is fortunate!!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 02:08 AM

Medium Density Fibreboard. A composite of wood pulp and fibre that is squished together to make a wood-like material. There were talks about having it banned recently, because of the dust it creates when being sawn.

Not so fortunate for the tree though.....

LTS

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 10:30 AM

Most of the ideas posted above are listed in:
Brasch, Rudolph: How did it begin? : customs & superstitions and their romantic origins / R. Brasch. - Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd, 1965.
New ed.: Sydney : Fontana, 1986. - ISBN 0-00-636898-0.

I only have the German translation. Here an abstract:
Touching wood is a superstitional use to avert the turning of luck for persons or things spoken about.
- 1. Usual explanation: touching a piece of the Holy Cross shall keep the good luck.
- 2. Knocking at the church door and asking for asylum put the supplicant under protection, nobody and nothing could harm him any more.
- 3. When people lived in wooden houses, they knocked at the (wooden) walls so the bad spirits couldn't hear when somebody talked about his good luck.
- 4. The usage is possibly older; in heathen times people believed that the powers of the God entered the tree struck by a lightning. E.g. God of Thunder was housed in oaks. To touch its wood would bestow the magical powers to the person doing so.

In Germany instead of touching wood we knock on wood thrice. (Concise dictionary of superstition. No explanations given)

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: MMario
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 10:39 AM

weren't certain woods suppossed to keep away evil influences as well? Rowan I believe was one.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 10:49 AM

Jenny G - Since I don't know in which library you're working I checked the 3 catalogues I found in Sydney.
How did it begin is available at
University of Sydney Library
University of Western Sydney, Libraries, Voyager

Another work by the same author at University of Technology, Library, Sydney:
Brasch, R. (Rudolph), 1912-
There's a reason for everything : more customs and superstitions and how they all began / R. Brasch. - [Sydney] : Fontana, Collins, 1982

Giving the original remarks would surely prove more convenient for our English customers than my rather helpless abstract.

Your fellow librarian
Wilfried
Oriental Librarian at the University of Giessen, German

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 10:54 AM

oops - Germany

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Juan P-B
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 11:52 AM

I'd always understood that it refers to the woodsmen touching the tree to placate the forest spirits living in there before he chopped the tree down.

I like some of the others though - especially 'touching cloth' - I had heard that referred to as 'ground-hogging'!!

JP-B

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: Blowzabella
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 12:33 PM

I remember hearing that the original saying was something like 'Touch Wood, no Good. Touch...(something else, something else). Unfortunately I can't remember the rest of it. (If it's true, it seems that nobody else can either and we are now all doing ourselves 'no good' by touching wood!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Touch Wood?
From: GUEST
Date: 07 Oct 04 - 12:45 PM

maritime superstition "touch wood, no good. Touch Iron, rely on"