Fragments of the forest

Fragments from the Forest, Part 2 – Touching Wood Today

Posted on by david

An American version of touching wood is to ‘knock wood’ or ‘knocking on wood’, something that has featured in a number of popular songs. One was featured in the film Knock on Wood, a 1954 comedy starring Danny Kaye, in which he plays an American ventriloquist with a jealous dummy. Another appeared in the film Casablanca and yet another composed by Eddie Floyd in 1966 which has been covered by over thirty artists, including James Taylor, Eric Clapton, Wilson Pickett, Cher and David Bowie. In the latter song knocking on wood is used to help keep a lover.

Knocking on or touching wood is so common in our culture that it has now become part of our everyday language, so much so that a Jewish friend of mine now uses the phrase without thinking even though there are a range of customs available from her own culture to ward off evil, such as spitting three times (ppp-ppp-ppp) before mentioning anything good.
Many people do touch wood and believe that it can be effective. Research by the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago has found that people feel much better when they touch wood, in that bad luck has by some means been ‘pushed away’. For many Christians it is symbolic of touching the wood of the true cross.

There is also a suggestion that touching wood is designed to retain the ‘status quo’, in other words to preserve things as they are. So if you are having a run of good luck then touching wood might help it to continue. This interpretation apparently also applies to the superstition of crossing your fingers where your best wishes are designed to keep someone in good health or fortune rather than to increase it. Although in both cases many of us still hope that by touching wood or crossing our fingers we can improve the situation for either us or others.

Fragments From The Forest, Part 1 – Touching Wood

Posted on by david

Do you ever ‘touch wood’ for luck?
Perhaps when you have been a bit boastful, or ‘pushed your luck’ too far, or want success for some future venture, do you look for a piece of wood to touch, just in case it might help? This superstition is quite common and many people do, and quite a few others while not actually touching wood, will say ‘touch wood’ for the same reasons. Then there are some people who, if they cannot find any wood in this plastic world, will alleviate their anxiety by touching their heads, saying or implying that things will be alright because their ‘head is made of wood’. For others the problem is solved by carrying a small piece of wood with them all the time.
I can certainly remember as a schoolboy along with many of my classmates rapping the underside of the oak tip-up seat of my school desk with my knuckles for luck, particularly just before tests or examinations. I must have hoped that in some way it might compensate for the lack of revision that I should have done. Why the underside I was never quite understood, perhaps it was because the underside was raw wood , unsullied by years of polishing and therefore more powerfully connected to nature and those forces that we hoped would supply the luck. The underside of the desk was plywood and therefore did not count as ‘real’ wood.