Bad Superstitions

I never thought of myself as superstitious.

Friday the 13^th?

Throw salt over your shoulder?

Black cats?

Nah, I don’t believe any of those. They’re silly.

But I’ve recently come to realize that my thinking is rife with superstitions – buried so deep, I didn’t even know I had them.

As this article points out, some superstitions can be positive, can even have a kind of placebo effect.

But mine tend to be negative.

For instance,

Under the theory that it’s the unexpected that will get you, I believe that if you think of all the bad things that can happen, then they won’t happen. My whole family operates under this belief. Does it keep bad things from happening? No. But it does make you miserable and afraid and exhausted. It’s the very definition of “hypervigiliance,” a symptom of anxiety that Pamela Cytrynbaum wrote about so devastatingly at Psychology Today.

If you are waiting for news that might be bad, don’t make plans for the future beyond that because you are tempting fate and it will slap you down. The problem with this one, besides that it is illogical, is that there is always potentially bad news around the corner, so you never make plans.

Related: Never be hopeful, don’t dare to talk about how things might go right, because, again, you are tempting fate. This is the “don’t jinx yourself” and “knock on wood” superstition.

Even writing this, saying that I see that these beliefs aren’t logical, is making me uneasy, to tell you the truth.

But’s it's crazy-making, this focus on the negative.

Are you really supposed to live your life on tenterhooks?

I don’t believe it. (Well, I’m working on that.)

How about you and your superstitions? Are they good or bad?

Eggcorns

I always thought those funny turns of phrase people unwittingly say were malapropisms. But malapropisms are when someone, instead of using the word they meant, use another that sounds similar. Sometimes it can be funny but only because it doesn’t make sense. It’s like their spoken auto-correct went wrong.

What I’m thinking of are eggcorns. That’s when somebody uses a word or adjusts the word they use, not just because it sounds similar, but because it does make sense. The name “eggcorn” comes from a woman who thought that the word “acorn” was “eggcorn.” It made sense to her.

As Jan Freeman, who blogs about language, wrote six years ago when “eggcorn” was officially recognized as a word by the Oxford English Dictionary, “Because they make sense, eggcorns are interesting in a way that mere disfluencies and malapropisms are not: They show our minds at work on the language, reshaping an opaque phrase into something more plausible. They’re tiny linguistic treasures, pearls of imagination created by clothing an unfamiliar usage in a more recognizable costume.” She points out that eggcorns often go on to become an accepted part of our language. In other words, they help language evolve.

When Merriam Webster added eggcorn to its dictionary more recently, NPR and Time  published more examples and pointed out another nifty word: mondegreen, which is when people mishear song lyrics in ways that make goofy sense.

My favorite eggcorn was when my young daughter, referring to the kind of doctor women go to, called them “vaginacologists.”

She also came home from school one day excited to tell me all about the “Heimlich remover.”

My father, years ago, was talking about someone who had gone into a mental-health facility called Star Haven. He heard it as “Stark Raving.”

I love these.

Don't Have To

I tend to be a mindless rule-follower.

Years ago, my friend and I were waiting on a quiet subway platform when he dropped one of his gloves – a nice, leather glove – onto the tracks. He looked both ways, hopped down, picked up the glove, then neatly pulled himself back onto the platform.

 “Yes, there are rules, but you can still think for yourself,” he explained.

I’d like to say that moment had an immediate impact on me, but it didn’t.

Every year, I water my Christmas tree because you’re supposed to, ignoring that none of my trees have ever sucked up a drop of water.

Turns out, I’ve been doing it wrong.

This professor of forestry, who, incidentally, never watered his own Christmas trees until he did his study and said none of his plant-physiologist buddies did either, advises, A., buy your tree super-fresh, as in cut a few hours ago. (As if I, in Houston, have any hope of that.) B., he says recut the trunk when you get home, the way you cut the stems of flowers before putting them in a vase. (Duh. Why didn’t I think of that?)

Even then, though, within 12 hours, the tree will cover the new cut with resin.

I might try cutting the trunk but, then again, I’ve done it wrong for years and it’s been fine. The hell with it.

I have always washed raw chicken, thinking I was getting rid of bacteria. When my husband told me that’s not right, I didn’t believe him; he had to send me a link. Turns out he’s right: You should NOT wash raw chicken and other meats because you don’t get the bacteria off but you do splash it all over the kitchen.

So, I’m going to change.

I feel so daring.