Jinx! You Owe Me a Book!

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Anne, and I have with me Amina, and we’re calling from Jacksonville, Florida.

Anne and Amina. From Jacksonville, welcome to the show. What’s on your mind?

Thank you. We called because we wanted to talk about when you say jinx.

I don’t know if you have ever said the same thing at the same time, but when two people say the same exact thing at the same time, we say jinx.

And for my daughter, at her school, the way you break the jinx is how do you break the jinx?

So basically, the person has to knock on wood first.

And basically, another person has to say their name three times before they can talk again.

Oh, wow.

So we’ve heard like different ways. Some people will say, pinch or a post, you owe me a Coke, or you owe me a coconut.

I’ve heard you owe me a soda.

So we were just curious about how that started, like why people say jinx when they talk at the same time with the same words.

And I would also like to know, what is the original use of jinx?

Oh, wow, good.

And then we were just also wondering about the breaking, the quote-unquote breaking of the jinx, like to allow the person to speak again, like where those differences are.

Is it geographical?

Because I’m originally from New York. I never heard the you owe me a coconut before now with my daughter going to school in Jacksonville as an example.

And what did you say when you were a kid when you said the same thing as someone else?

So I remember vaguely it was more like the pinch, the poke.

It had some kind of like violent component to it, unfortunately.

Like you had to punch the person first and then you were the one who was in control of the ability to speak again.

Okay.

I don’t know.

And I grew up in Long Island. Long Island.

Okay.

And Amina has grown up there in Jacksonville.

Yes. She’s been here since she was three.

Let’s handle the word jinx first since that’s a lexical linguistic thing.

It actually comes from the name of a bird, the Latin word for a bird or actually the Greek word for it originally.

It’s a bird called the rye neck, W-R-Y-N-E-C-K, which was used in a variety of mystical kind of witchy charms and I don’t know what to call it, just spells.

It was often said to be involved with magical stuff.

And it was spelled in Latin I-Y-N-X, but that I is often changed to a J because there’s no J in Latin.

And so I before Y can sound like a J.

A modern Latin, it is spelled with a J, J-Y-N-X.

And so when you invoke the J, the jinx, you are invoking that bird, that mystical, magical bird, the jinx.

Oh, cool. We love birds.

How about that?

That’s awesome.

Yeah.

Goes back at least to the 1600s.

Wow.

But the word itself referring to that bird goes back to ancient Greek.

Now, as far as what you say when someone else says the same thing, let me ask Martha here.

Martha, what did you say when you were a kid and you and a friend said exactly the same thing at the same time?

When I was a kid and somebody said the same thing at the same time as I said it, we would say, jinx, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, you owe me a Coke if the other person didn’t stop you before you said you owe me a Coke.

Whoever got to 10 first was the one who won.

And let me ask you, did you ever pay out those Cokes?

Oh, heavens no.

Heavens no.

It was just the theoretical Coke, right?

It was just the idea that they were in your debt.

Yeah, yeah.

And I’ve actually never heard, jinx, you owe me a coconut.

That’s a great version of it.

Yeah, I like that because it just takes the sugary drink right out of it, right?

Yeah.

And I’m also wondering, Amina, what if you’re not anywhere near wood?

What do you do?

How do you knock on wood?

Well, kids tend to, there’s always, if not wood, there’s a table, there’s a piece of paper and people are like, knock on a piece of paper.

Right, because it’s made out of the same thing as wood.

Oh, smart.

Smart, yeah.

I do want to say that there are probably literally hundreds of different versions of things that people say when they say the same thing as someone else.

And just a few of them are, if two people say the same thing simultaneously, they shake hands and turn around or they say needles pins buffalo skins what goes up the chimney smoke or they say red blue needles pins shakespeare longfellow but yet in in in the uk if you say shakespeare you then it’s bad because then something shakes a spear at you and it’s bad luck.

And and other places you would say different poets you might say keats and iona and peter opie.

Great folklorists report that in parts of the UK, children would immediately be silent and then they would say things like, white rabbits, or you’ll get a letter tomorrow, or that’s my letter, and then stamp their foot, or shake hands, or touch wood and whistle.

And so there’s so many of these that people say when they say the same thing as someone else.

There’s no one thing.

These kinds of superstitions are widespread and prevalent throughout the world.

But I do want to recommend two books to you if you can find them.

One is the book by Iona and Peter Opie.

Martha knows I love this book.

I’ve talked about it on the show before.

It is called The Lore and Language of Children.

And the other one is a book that I came across recently and was shocked that I remembered it from my own childhood.

It was published in 1975.

It’s a collection of folklore by Duncan Emmerich, and it’s called The Whim-Wham Book, W-H-I-M, W-H-A-M.

And they’re both wonderful books that touch upon this bit of folklore and many, many other kinds of folklore that you will be delighted to dig into and just marvel at the creativity of children and humans in general as they just come up with all this weird stuff that involves, you know, pinky swears and turning around and shouting things up chimneys and sending empty letters to other people.

Just all this odd stuff.

Great. We love it.

It sounds fun. It’s fun to learn about this stuff.

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure. Thank you, Anne. Thank you, Amina. Bye-bye, you guys.

Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.