If you suffer from parashevidekatriaphobia, today is not a good day for you. The up side is, today is the only day you need to be concerned about this year. Some years have up to three Friday the 13ths. This year only has one.
Apparently, parashevidekatriaphobia is the fear of Friday the 13th. For may years, I thought it was triskaidekaphobia, but that’s just the fear of the number 13 itself. For Friday the 13th in particular, they seemed to feel the need to come up with an even longer word.
There are a couple theories as to where this all came from. You have the Norse theory, where twelve Norse gods were having a dinner party and Loki wasn’t invited. He showed up anyway, had one of the other gods killed, and the earth turned dark and mourned. It was not a good day.
The you have the Judas theory, with the unlucky number of thirteen people at the last supper.
You can find any number of bad things that have happened connected to the number thirteen. If you wanted to look hard enough, you could probably find any number of bad things associated with any number. Whether or not there is any truth to it can depend on how you look at it.
But when you look at a number of superstitions, some of them make some sense. Don’t walk under a ladder? That makes sense. Something could get dropped on your head. Breaking a mirror might not give you a full seven years of bad luck, but picking up little tiny bits of glass can lead to some nasty little cuts.
And I could never quite get the black cat thing. I’ve owned a black cat. He was actually a rather nice animal. He liked to go on walks with me, which could be a little annoying because he tended to get distracted and wander off to check things out, then get upset because you didn’t wait for him, but he was a good cat. The only reason I have ever found to fear black cats is if your are wearing light coloured clothing. They do shed like any other cat and seem to delight in leaving the evidence behind.
But I do not suffer from parashevidekatriaphobia. I do have hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, which is the fear of long words. Which is a bit ironic, since the fear of long words is a word thirty-five letters long. Or it could be sesquipedalophobia. There seems to be some debate over which word fits better. But they are both really long themselves.
And I’m not going to try to say either one.
