“Lucky Lucky White Horse” Rhyme and Good-Luck Gestures

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Katherine Hoffman from Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Hey, Katherine.

What can we do for you today?

I’ve long been curious about my grandmother.

She was kind of an unknown to us.

We don’t know who her parents were.

She was in an orphanage.

She kind of had a bad life and she wasn’t a real pleasant person.

But one of the highlights of my relationship with her was I have this memory of her standing next to me.

I must have been about five or six.

We lived in Galesburg, Illinois, and a horse with the wagon was coming by.

It was a white horse.

I don’t know what the wagon was delivering or why there was a horse and wagon in in the early 1950s, but it was passing her big house and she stood there with my sister and I and she told us to say this phrase and use our hands.

And it was lucky lucky white horse, ding ding ding.

And we were supposed to take our left hand and our thumb and lick it and put it in the palm of our right hand each time we said ding ding ding.

And apparently that was supposed to give us good luck, I guess.

And I’m hoping that you all can tell me the origin of that and also maybe help me with the mystery of my grandmother and what place she was from because we don’t we know very little about her and she didn’t share a lot during her life.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

Well, did it work?

Did you get the luck?

I don’t know.

I guess everyone has had lots of good and some not so good luck, right?

Yeah, that’s true.

But I I just want to say, ding, ding, ding.

You are onto something here.

Your memory is solid, Catherine.

You you really because other people have very similar folklore in their lives, and it’s been recorded in various folklore journals and books over over maybe the last hundred years ago.

So there are a lot of different versions of this.

Sometimes people extend the little the little recitation, and so it goes Lucky lucky white horse ding dong day, whatever I wish bring me today.

Oh Or my lucky lucky white horse, lucky lucky Lee, lucky lucky white horse, bring your luck to me.

But a lot of them do also involve, like, spitting in your hand or licking a finger and smacking your hands against each other or are pressing your thumb or your finger in your hand, where you’ve moist moistened it.

And, and sometimes you have to see 11 white horses before you get the luck and not just one.

But I want to tell you, Katherine, the thing that is so amazing about this to me is that the idea of a white horse is lucky goes back to the ancients.

The ancient Greeks had many different allusions in their writing to the value and the preciousness and the sacredness of a white horse.

And the Babylonian Talmud, which is from around fifteen hundred years ago, has a line in it that translates from the Hebrew as one who sees a white horse in a dream, regardless of whether the horse was walking or running.

It is a good omen for him.

Wow.

I wondered if it were, like, more common for people of a certain ethnic background.

We don’t know anything about my grandmother’s background.

And that’s what I was hoping too, that not just I would learn about the origin of the phrase, how curious it was, but also if maybe it would give me a clue to my grandmother’s where she was born.

Now, we don’t even know what her original last name was.

So.

Wow.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really give us any clues to that.

I think if there’s something for you to take away about this bit of folklore, is that she plugged you in to a 2,000 year old folklore tradition, and that’s kind of amazing.

It is.

It’s very amazing.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, our pleasure.

You take care, and thank you for sharing your memory with us.

We appreciate it.

Bye bye.

Stay put.

We’ll be right back to Untangle the Web of English.