All Episodes

September 13, 2023 11 mins

Face it, when you spill salt your life goes totally off the rails, maybe even forever. Fortunately, we humans stumbled upon the one reliable way to counteract that bad luck by tossing some over our left shoulder.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and
there's Chuck and we're doing it by ourselves, doing it
in the park, doing it after dark. It's short stuff.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Yeah. And you know what, this was a little treat
for me because this is one of the old House
Stuff Works articles written by Debbie Ronkham, my good friend.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, yep, I saw that. When I picked that, I
was like, Chuck's gonna love this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
That was a time when we were writing there where
I ended up getting quite a few of my friends
freelance jobs, and Debbie was one of them. And we
just saw deb at our show in Boston.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah, Hey, Debbie, so it's good to catch up with her. Yeah.
And she did a great job with this because it's
not easy to talk about superstitions and keep your wits
about you. You can get so scared, yeah, that you
are just going to get off track. You might stop
writing altogether. But she cloud through and came up with
a great article from How Stuff Works about why it's

(00:59):
bad luck to spill Because everybody knows it's bad luck
to spill salt, but why And then on top of that,
have you ever noticed some people throw salt over their
left shoulder when they spill it. I do. Why would
we do that too.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Here's the thing. I know that superstitions can be regional,
and I'm not seeing people in the South don't do this.
But I've never seen anyone do this. I know it's
a thing. I've heard of it, but I never did it.
I don't. Maybe I've never spilled salt. I don't know,
but I've never known people who did it, So it

(01:33):
just wasn't a popular thing for me as like growing.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Up or now, thrown it over your shoulder.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, I've never seen anyone do this stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
So, yeah, I do it every time. But it's possible though.
That's I guess I want to establish. You've known forever
that spilling salt is bad luck at least, right No?

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Oh, okay, I mean I've heard about it and seen
it in movies, but it wasn't. It wasn't like a
superstition that was prominent for me for some reason.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Okay, but you i'd heard of it, like, this isn't
like news to you?

Speaker 2 (02:02):
No, no, no, it wasn't news. I was just like,
who does this? And why is everyone spilling salt?

Speaker 1 (02:07):
So, yeah, the thing about spilling salt in it being
a superstition? Is it seems to be a really really
old superstition that's been passed down through millennia essentially, and
it's still around today, which is kind of funny because
I don't actually consider myself superstitious, but yet I still
throw salt over my left shoulder every time I spill it.

(02:28):
And I spill a lot of salt.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
What does spilling salt mean? Like you reach for the
shaker and you tip it over by accident.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
I do it anytime the salt touches the counter or
anything aside from the salt box that I use.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
So like, if you're shaking a little salt on food
and some like jumps off onto the counter, that you
will that's considered spilling it.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
No, I don't actually know that you mentioned that. This
is more I'll grab a pinch out of the salt
box and be salting stuff and if that gets messy
then yeah, okay. It's almost like if I see it
and notice it, then I will I will throw it
over my shoulder, all right.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
I love it. I'm certainly not. I mean, I'm the
weirdo that steps on a crack with their left foot.
Then has to step on a crack with their right flet.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
So there's one thing we need to dispense with right
out of the gate, because there's it's a well known
fact that the word salary is derived from salt sal dare,
which means give salt in I think Latin, and that
that is how Roman soldiers used to be paid. That
is not entirely correct, but it doesn't seem to be

(03:33):
fully a myth either. Roman soldiers were partially paid in salt,
like they got a salt ration every day, or part
of their money their pay, the actual coinage they were
given was given to them to buy salt in part
to buy salt.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Now, we did a great episode on salt. I'm sure
we talked about that. Do you remember what we said then.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
I think we said it was maybe even a myth altogether.
I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
It's just it's it's ambiguous enough that you can't say
it's fully a myth or it's fully true.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
Right. But the idea then, in terms of this episode,
is because salt was valuable, that could be one of
the reasons or one of the origins of it being
bad luck. Because you've just essentially spilled some money.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
It's yeah, exactly. That's that's the likeliest and widest held
explanation for why spilling salt would be considered bad luck.
All right, what else you can kind of fast forward
a few years to Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the
Last Supper. I think that was in the sixteenth century
that he did that. And if you look very closely,

(04:40):
when Judas is scary out has spilled the salt.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
I didn't ever notice that.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
I didn't either, but I haven't seen it that many times.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
I haven't either, now that I think about it. But
it was you know, I grew up in the church,
so it was a prominent painting.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
But if you if you mentioned Judas and salt in
the same same breath, he probably would have been like, yeah,
Judas is terrible with salt, and that's why he was
such a terrible person.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
All right, fair enough, that could be another you know,
religious connotation for the bad luck.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Well also, though I thought this is pretty interesting. In Christianity,
it's also seen as a symbol of holiness and purity,
which is not just symbolic. It actually does keep food pure.
It's one of the things that salt has always been
used for is preservation, so I thought that was a
pretty interesting extension or expansion or extrapolation.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah, agreed. Shall we take a break, Yeah, all right,
let's take a break. We'll talk about maybe some more
background and why we throw it over our left shoulder
right after this.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Okay, chuck. So there's been a lot of different myths
about salt that has spread out, which kind of makes
sense because salt's been traded all over the world for
a while, and it's been valuable, or it was valuable
for a very long time. For example, in Slavic mythology,
there's a well trod story about a father who has

(06:25):
three daughters and he asks them how much they love him,
and the first one says, I love you as much
as diamonds, the second one says I love you as
much as gold, and the third one says I love
you as much as salt. And he says, begone, yeah,
get out, and she's like, why, just stop and think
about what I said, dad, And he said, I said
be gone, and she's begone.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, she goned herself. And it was only till later,
when he's eating something that's not salted that he puts
down his fork. The music cue the needle drop happens,
and lone tear trickles down his face and he goes,
oh my god, she's the one who loved me the most,
because this food is garbage.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
There's an alternate ending too, where the tear strikes the
bite of food he has mid air salts it and
he forgets what he was even upset about.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Oh look, I just actually looked up the Judas thing
and there there it is. There's a little thing of
salt spilled over right there It is a wrist.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
Did you think Debbie Ranka made that up?

Speaker 2 (07:29):
No? But I just never noticed that had been so funny.
I text Debbie and she's like, age, you like that?
It totally made that up. There are African folk tales apparently,
where salt is a metaphor for wisdom or life trials,
things like that. So if you would spill it then
it could be viewed as a misfortune or ignorance for

(07:52):
the protagonist.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
Also in Japan, I can tell you firsthand. In Japanese culture,
salt is considered protect okay, especially against from you know,
bad luck or evil spirits or whatever. And I was
first introduced to this when one day you me had
visited her family and later on she opened up her
glove compartment and found that there was a prescription bottle

(08:16):
filled with salt that her mom had put in her
glove compartment to drive around with without telling.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
Her, for just good luck.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah, to keep her protected while she's out thriving, and
that's Sweet's.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
Great, yeah, Or she happened to have some French fries
that were a little bland, that's right. So now we're
at the point where we can talk a little bit
about how to ward it off. Because usually when there's
any sort of a bad luck omen there's also an
antidote of sorts where you can combat that bad luck,
and in this case, it is usually a toss over

(08:47):
the left shoulder. And the reasons behind that seemed to
be linked to the fact that supposedly, in many many cultures,
the devil sits over there on behind behind your left shoulder,
waiting for sort of an invitation, and this salt spilling
the salt could be that invitation and then quickly throwing

(09:09):
it over your left shoulder. The devil's like.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
That stings, yeah, or if he's small enough, it really
desiccates him.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
Right, yeah, right, like a slug right.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
So yeah, that's why you use your left because sinister
is Latin for left originally, but it came to mean sinister,
and so that's that's why you're left. In particular, why
the devil's on your left shoulder, not just in other cultures,
but in cartoons throughout the world.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah, I never noticed left or right, but I mean
every cartoon have like the Little Angel and the Little Devil,
and I'm sure that they probably put him on the left.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
Yes, And the brilliance of the Flintstones was that they
combined both into one great kazoo. Oh God, I love kazoo.
You dumb, dumb.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
He was so good. It was good stuff.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
So I guess that. Huh. Oh wait. There's one more
thing about about throwing salt over your shoulder, especially if
you're a superstitious type. What it does is it relieves
you of a little bit of the anxiety that you
might otherwise have walking around that day knowing that you
spill the salt and wondering what bad thing's going to happen.

(10:20):
That just small act of throwing salt over your left
shoulder allows you to just get over it and move
on with your day and that over time, that seeing
that that actually helps, that there is some benefit to
doing that just kind of created a positive feedback loop
where more and more people started throwing salt over their shoulder.

(10:40):
This is all conjecture, but it makes a lot of sense.
Totally love it.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
I'm going to start doing it. I'm going to spill
some salt and throw it over my shoulder.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
Do not purposefully spill salt. That is really right, We'll
just notice it then, O good. All right, Well that
means everybody short. Stuff is out.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Should Know News

Advertise With Us

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Josh Clark

Josh Clark

Chuck Bryant

Chuck Bryant

Show Links

AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSS
Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2024 iHeartMedia, Inc.