Laura in San Diego, California, wonders about the tradition of performers saying Toi toi toi to each other backstage to wish each other a good performance. It’s possible that it derives from the ancient idea that spitting three times can ward off the evil eye. Today performers sometimes simply text each other #toix3. It’s possible it comes from the German word Teufel or “devil,” but no one is sure. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Toi Toi Toi”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Laura. I’m calling from Escondido, California in San Diego County.
Welcome to the show.
What can we do for you?
There’s a word or a phrase that my sister uses right before her son goes in to perform. Toy, toy, toy, or toa, toa, toa. And she says it’s for good luck, but we’re trying to figure out what exactly it actually meant and how it came about to being used.
Your sister uses it when her son does what?
Oh, he goes up to perform. He’s a ballet dancer for San Diego Ballet. And right before he goes up for performances, I guess they’ll say it in the hall. They’ll say like, twa, twa, twa, or something before he goes up there and thought it was kind of funny.
And any idea how to spell that?
She told me it was like T-O-I, T-O-I, T-O-I.
Yeah, yeah, that’s how it usually appears as three words, toy, toy, toy. As far as I know, it refers to this superstition that if you say that, the person will have a good performance. And I’ve always seen it linked to the idea of the superstition that involves spitting, you know, throughout history, all the way back to classical times. And around the world, people have connected spitting with somehow warding off the evil eye or warding off evil.
I once read this article, I kid you not, called The Saliva Superstition in Classical Literature, which talks about all these writers in antiquity talking about different ways that you can use spit to either keep snakes away from you, or the Roman historian Pliny said that you could spit if you meet a person who’s lame in the right leg, and that way nothing bad will happen to you. So there’s this long tradition of, you know, there’s something in saliva or something in spit that keeps the evil at bay. And there’s at least one story that toy, toy, toy has to do with the sound of spitting. And this has even become, in modern times, yeah, right?
In modern times, this has even become a hashtag. Sometimes performers will text each other before a performance, and it’ll just say hashtag toy times three.
Oh, my God, that’s so funny.
Isn’t that wild? You know how some performers, like in France, will say mared to each other before they go on stage.
Oh, I’ve heard that one before.
Oh, okay, all right, same idea. Yeah, there’s a variety of these things, like break a leg and so forth, or Hausenbrinbock.
So in English, we got this from where, Martha? Where did we pick it up?
Well, that’s a good question. I mean, there are some suspicions that perhaps it comes from German or Yiddish. The German word Teufel means devil, and it might have to do with that. It’s probably one big mess. That’s my sense of it anyway.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve gathered as well, is that there was this, we picked it up from maybe German opera and German performing. There were these two hit songs in the 1920s and 30s that really brought it to light. There was one that might be translated in English. The song was called Knock on Wood, Toy, Toy, Toy. The German word is umberufen. I can’t even say it. U-N-B-E-R-U-F-E-N. It doesn’t really translate, but it basically means away or avoid the badness, something like that. And in English, we would say knock on wood because that’s what you do to avoid the badness. It’s pretty cool.
And Yiddish has a long tradition of all these different sounds rendered a bunch of different ways where you spit to show your rejection of the possible bad things happening.
Yeah, so I guess it’s a more dignified way of just saying those three syllables rather than actually doing the spitting.
That’s so funny.
Oh, my God. I can’t wait to tell my sister.
Excellent. This is really funny.
All right. Thanks, Laura. I really appreciate the call.
Thanks, Laura, for calling. Toy, toy, toy.
No problem. Bye-bye.
Toy times three.
All right. Bye-bye.
There’s a weird language about everything we do, whether it be a hobby or a job or our time in the military. Maybe it’s something that happened on a trip a long time ago that your family still brings up, and it’s kind of an in-joke. You know, Martha and I love to hear those stories. Tell us about the little jargons and slangs that you’ve come up with.
Or tell us about the ones that have been passed down from generation to generation, be they from boss to employee, from grandparent to grandchild, or from cousin to cousin. You can tell us words@waywordradio.org or on Twitter @wayword.
