Today is Friday the 13th. For some, it is not a lucky day. Many others just don’t care.
I am in the don’t care portion. We always have at least one Friday the 13th at some point in the year. Some years we have more. This is our second Friday the 13th this year. The last one was in March, so you may not have noticed, since we all likely had other things on our mind. Next year, we just have one Friday the 13th… in August.
But I have never noticed anything particularly unlucky about Friday the 13th. Sure, some days are better than others, but that just is the way life tends to go.
If you look up Friday the 13th, it is a relatively new thing. There was no real mention of any significance to the day until the early 1800s. Some people have had phobias concerning the day, but it’s hard to say if it has any real connection. Apparently, the Knights Templar were all arrested and charged with blasphemy on a Friday the 13th. Not a good day for them. The number 13 has some bad connections to other things, like the last supper, but really, it’s only the last couple hundred years people have been putting these things together.
About the only real reason to fear Friday the 13 comes from trying to pronounce the word associated with the phobia of such a day. Friggatristaidekaphobia. That one partial comes from the Norse, since Frigga is the Norse god for which Friday was named. Or you can use paraskevidekatriaphobia which comes from the Greek and means pretty much the same.
Either way, I can’t pronounce it. And don’t ask me to try.
