Today is Friday the 13th. How spooky!
Nothing out of the ordinary happened today, though. I'm not a superstitious person (at least I don't think so), it's just that it would have been interesting if something had happened. In my view it wouldn't have changed anything, but it would have been perhaps amusing to have suffered from a case of "bad luck" on the supposed unluckiest day of the month.
I was a bit curious about the reasons why the number 13 is so feared, so I googled it. A quick read on Wikipedia revealed a number of things, mostly that 13 was associated with some not-so-good things such as the busted 2012 Mayan apocalypse theory, the Code of Hammurabi supposedly omitting a 13th law, and in the Bible, Judas was the 13th apostle to sit down at the last supper. The Code of Hammurabi, as it turns out, was not numbered originally and the lack of a 13th was more due to a person who transcribed it as such; similarly, apparently there was never a real order recorded that the apostles sat down in.
I also found in my research an interesting story about Ireland involving their vehicle plate registrations. As the story goes, the first two digits of a normal vehicle plate in Ireland represented the year the vehicle was registered on; so if an Irishman's car was registered in 2011, its plate would start with 11. In an effort to avoid lower car sales due to the superstition around the number 13, the Irish government decided to utilize two different numbers for this year's registered plates: 131 and 132, with the numbers representing cars registered in the first and last half, respectively, of 2013. This story reminded me of how certain buildings lack a 13th floor or a 13th room.
On a related note, one of the first reasonable explanations I've heard for fear of certain numbers comes from my brief experience with Japanese. In my first couple years of college, I studied Japanese language and culture and did decently well in it. One of the first things you learn is how to count, but the number in question is for 4. In Japanese, one pronunciation for 4 is "shi," which is also how one would pronounce "death." Looking into the fear of numbers, I learned that 9 was also considered unlucky in Japan because its pronunciation--ku--is the same way a person would pronounce "suffering." As a result, these numbers tend to be both avoided and replaced with different pronunciations (yon and kyuu respectively).
It's amazing how folks do so much just to avoid a particular number, ha.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened today, though. I'm not a superstitious person (at least I don't think so), it's just that it would have been interesting if something had happened. In my view it wouldn't have changed anything, but it would have been perhaps amusing to have suffered from a case of "bad luck" on the supposed unluckiest day of the month.
I was a bit curious about the reasons why the number 13 is so feared, so I googled it. A quick read on Wikipedia revealed a number of things, mostly that 13 was associated with some not-so-good things such as the busted 2012 Mayan apocalypse theory, the Code of Hammurabi supposedly omitting a 13th law, and in the Bible, Judas was the 13th apostle to sit down at the last supper. The Code of Hammurabi, as it turns out, was not numbered originally and the lack of a 13th was more due to a person who transcribed it as such; similarly, apparently there was never a real order recorded that the apostles sat down in.
I also found in my research an interesting story about Ireland involving their vehicle plate registrations. As the story goes, the first two digits of a normal vehicle plate in Ireland represented the year the vehicle was registered on; so if an Irishman's car was registered in 2011, its plate would start with 11. In an effort to avoid lower car sales due to the superstition around the number 13, the Irish government decided to utilize two different numbers for this year's registered plates: 131 and 132, with the numbers representing cars registered in the first and last half, respectively, of 2013. This story reminded me of how certain buildings lack a 13th floor or a 13th room.
On a related note, one of the first reasonable explanations I've heard for fear of certain numbers comes from my brief experience with Japanese. In my first couple years of college, I studied Japanese language and culture and did decently well in it. One of the first things you learn is how to count, but the number in question is for 4. In Japanese, one pronunciation for 4 is "shi," which is also how one would pronounce "death." Looking into the fear of numbers, I learned that 9 was also considered unlucky in Japan because its pronunciation--ku--is the same way a person would pronounce "suffering." As a result, these numbers tend to be both avoided and replaced with different pronunciations (yon and kyuu respectively).
It's amazing how folks do so much just to avoid a particular number, ha.
No comments:
Post a Comment