Did everyone have a good Friday the 13th? Statistically, somebody somewhere had a bad one, though statistics wouldn’t support any correlation between the date and unhappy events in general. In fact, I’d imagine that Friday the 13th’s greatest overall effect is to ensure that none of us will ever quite forget the word triskaidekaphobia, no matter how seldom it crops up in our lives otherwise.
Friday the 13th is an interesting sort of … holiday isn’t really the right word; occasion might be a better one. It’s a hybrid, for one thing. The number thirteen, and Friday, were both watched out for separately but it wasn’t until exactly one hundred years ago that someone got the bright idea that Friday the 13th would therefore amount to a hyper-unlucky day. That someone was a Thomas William Lawson, who in 1907 published a novel called (surprise!) Friday, The Thirteenth. It’s about the stock market, but more than that I cannot tell you until I finish reading the online PDF.
Before then, by far the most prevalent superstition involving the number thirteen was that seating thirteen at a table meant that one of the number would die within a year.
Posted by sonetka
