Short Stuff: Why Spilling Salt is Unlucky

Published Sep 13, 2023, 9:00 AM

Face it, when you spill salt your life goes totally off the rails, maybe even forever. Fortunately, we humans stumbled upon the one reliable way to counteract that bad luck by tossing some over our left shoulder.

Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we're doing it by ourselves, doing it in the park, doing it after dark. It's short stuff.

Yeah. And you know what, this was a little treat for me because this is one of the old House Stuff Works articles written by Debbie Ronkham, my good friend.

Yeah, yep, I saw that. When I picked that, I was like, Chuck's gonna love this. Yeah.

That was a time when we were writing there where I ended up getting quite a few of my friends freelance jobs, and Debbie was one of them. And we just saw deb at our show in Boston.

Yeah, Hey, Debbie, so it's good to catch up with her. Yeah. And she did a great job with this because it's not easy to talk about superstitions and keep your wits about you. You can get so scared, yeah, that you are just going to get off track. You might stop writing altogether. But she cloud through and came up with a great article from How Stuff Works about why it's bad luck to spill Because everybody knows it's bad luck to spill salt, but why And then on top of that, have you ever noticed some people throw salt over their left shoulder when they spill it. I do. Why would we do that too.

Here's the thing. I know that superstitions can be regional, and I'm not seeing people in the South don't do this. But I've never seen anyone do this. I know it's a thing. I've heard of it, but I never did it. I don't. Maybe I've never spilled salt. I don't know, but I've never known people who did it, So it just wasn't a popular thing for me as like growing.

Up or now, thrown it over your shoulder.

Yeah, I've never seen anyone do this stuff.

So, yeah, I do it every time. But it's possible though. That's I guess I want to establish. You've known forever that spilling salt is bad luck at least, right No?

Oh, okay, I mean I've heard about it and seen it in movies, but it wasn't. It wasn't like a superstition that was prominent for me for some reason.

Okay, but you i'd heard of it, like, this isn't like news to you?

No, no, no, it wasn't news. I was just like, who does this? And why is everyone spilling salt?

So, yeah, the thing about spilling salt in it being a superstition? Is it seems to be a really really old superstition that's been passed down through millennia essentially, and it's still around today, which is kind of funny because I don't actually consider myself superstitious, but yet I still throw salt over my left shoulder every time I spill it. And I spill a lot of salt.

What does spilling salt mean? Like you reach for the shaker and you tip it over by accident.

I do it anytime the salt touches the counter or anything aside from the salt box that I use.

So like, if you're shaking a little salt on food and some like jumps off onto the counter, that you will that's considered spilling it.

No, I don't actually know that you mentioned that. This is more I'll grab a pinch out of the salt box and be salting stuff and if that gets messy then yeah, okay. It's almost like if I see it and notice it, then I will I will throw it over my shoulder, all right.

I love it. I'm certainly not. I mean, I'm the weirdo that steps on a crack with their left foot. Then has to step on a crack with their right flet.

So there's one thing we need to dispense with right out of the gate, because there's it's a well known fact that the word salary is derived from salt sal dare, which means give salt in I think Latin, and that that is how Roman soldiers used to be paid. That is not entirely correct, but it doesn't seem to be fully a myth either. Roman soldiers were partially paid in salt, like they got a salt ration every day, or part of their money their pay, the actual coinage they were given was given to them to buy salt in part to buy salt.

Now, we did a great episode on salt. I'm sure we talked about that. Do you remember what we said then.

I think we said it was maybe even a myth altogether. I'm not sure.

I don't know.

It's just it's it's ambiguous enough that you can't say it's fully a myth or it's fully true.

Right. But the idea then, in terms of this episode, is because salt was valuable, that could be one of the reasons or one of the origins of it being bad luck. Because you've just essentially spilled some money.

It's yeah, exactly. That's that's the likeliest and widest held explanation for why spilling salt would be considered bad luck. All right, what else you can kind of fast forward a few years to Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper. I think that was in the sixteenth century that he did that. And if you look very closely, when Judas is scary out has spilled the salt.

I didn't ever notice that.

I didn't either, but I haven't seen it that many times.

I haven't either, now that I think about it. But it was you know, I grew up in the church, so it was a prominent painting.

But if you if you mentioned Judas and salt in the same same breath, he probably would have been like, yeah, Judas is terrible with salt, and that's why he was such a terrible person.

All right, fair enough, that could be another you know, religious connotation for the bad luck.

Well also, though I thought this is pretty interesting. In Christianity, it's also seen as a symbol of holiness and purity, which is not just symbolic. It actually does keep food pure. It's one of the things that salt has always been used for is preservation, so I thought that was a pretty interesting extension or expansion or extrapolation.

Yeah, agreed. Shall we take a break, Yeah, all right, let's take a break. We'll talk about maybe some more background and why we throw it over our left shoulder right after this.

Okay, chuck. So there's been a lot of different myths about salt that has spread out, which kind of makes sense because salt's been traded all over the world for a while, and it's been valuable, or it was valuable for a very long time. For example, in Slavic mythology, there's a well trod story about a father who has three daughters and he asks them how much they love him, and the first one says, I love you as much as diamonds, the second one says I love you as much as gold, and the third one says I love you as much as salt. And he says, begone, yeah, get out, and she's like, why, just stop and think about what I said, dad, And he said, I said be gone, and she's begone.

Yeah, she goned herself. And it was only till later, when he's eating something that's not salted that he puts down his fork. The music cue the needle drop happens, and lone tear trickles down his face and he goes, oh my god, she's the one who loved me the most, because this food is garbage.

There's an alternate ending too, where the tear strikes the bite of food he has mid air salts it and he forgets what he was even upset about.

Oh look, I just actually looked up the Judas thing and there there it is. There's a little thing of salt spilled over right there It is a wrist.

Did you think Debbie Ranka made that up?

No? But I just never noticed that had been so funny. I text Debbie and she's like, age, you like that? It totally made that up. There are African folk tales apparently, where salt is a metaphor for wisdom or life trials, things like that. So if you would spill it then it could be viewed as a misfortune or ignorance for the protagonist.

Also in Japan, I can tell you firsthand. In Japanese culture, salt is considered protect okay, especially against from you know, bad luck or evil spirits or whatever. And I was first introduced to this when one day you me had visited her family and later on she opened up her glove compartment and found that there was a prescription bottle filled with salt that her mom had put in her glove compartment to drive around with without telling.

Her, for just good luck.

Yeah, to keep her protected while she's out thriving, and that's Sweet's.

Great, yeah, Or she happened to have some French fries that were a little bland, that's right. So now we're at the point where we can talk a little bit about how to ward it off. Because usually when there's any sort of a bad luck omen there's also an antidote of sorts where you can combat that bad luck, and in this case, it is usually a toss over the left shoulder. And the reasons behind that seemed to be linked to the fact that supposedly, in many many cultures, the devil sits over there on behind behind your left shoulder, waiting for sort of an invitation, and this salt spilling the salt could be that invitation and then quickly throwing it over your left shoulder. The devil's like.

That stings, yeah, or if he's small enough, it really desiccates him.

Right, yeah, right, like a slug right.

So yeah, that's why you use your left because sinister is Latin for left originally, but it came to mean sinister, and so that's that's why you're left. In particular, why the devil's on your left shoulder, not just in other cultures, but in cartoons throughout the world.

Yeah, I never noticed left or right, but I mean every cartoon have like the Little Angel and the Little Devil, and I'm sure that they probably put him on the left.

Yes, And the brilliance of the Flintstones was that they combined both into one great kazoo. Oh God, I love kazoo. You dumb, dumb.

He was so good. It was good stuff.

So I guess that. Huh. Oh wait. There's one more thing about about throwing salt over your shoulder, especially if you're a superstitious type. What it does is it relieves you of a little bit of the anxiety that you might otherwise have walking around that day knowing that you spill the salt and wondering what bad thing's going to happen. That just small act of throwing salt over your left shoulder allows you to just get over it and move on with your day and that over time, that seeing that that actually helps, that there is some benefit to doing that just kind of created a positive feedback loop where more and more people started throwing salt over their shoulder. This is all conjecture, but it makes a lot of sense. Totally love it.

I'm going to start doing it. I'm going to spill some salt and throw it over my shoulder.

Do not purposefully spill salt. That is really right, We'll just notice it then, O good. All right, Well that means everybody short. Stuff is out.

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