Other than a reluctance to talk about possible good futures with certainty, my main superstitious behaviors have to do with my own books. (The use of “hoodoo” doesn’t make me feel great about the chances of the show not being racist!) This musical seems to have survived only in dictionary entries about the word jinx, so perhaps it was itself cursed. Before that, “Jinks” seems to have been the name of some incompetent or unlucky characters in 19th-century songs and Vaudeville shows, including one named “Jinks Hoodoo” in a musical called Little Puck. But contemporary usage doesn’t have much to do with these woodpeckers, no matter how eerily contortionist.Īs a noun, jinx (or jinks ) shows up frequently among superstitious baseball players from the 1910s onward, and it was probably in that context that it became a verb, although its verb forms don’t show up in writing until the 1960s. Seventeenth-century English also had the word jyng, meaning a charm or a spell, which is probably related to jinx. Its origin is probably a type of Old World woodpecker called a “wryneck” or a “jynx,” a bird associated with witchcraft, and if you watch a video of these creepy little weirdos and their horrible snake necks, you’ll see why people thought they were cursed. Jinx is native to English, so the idea that talking about something good might prevent it from happening is not exclusive to Ashkenazim. Anything else is an invitation for catastrophe. You don’t talk about your baby until your baby is born. The easiest example of Jewish attitudes about luck is that Ashkenazi Jews don’t hold baby showers. Maybe this is a Jewish attitude either way. I’d say instead that if you talk too much or too openly about good things in your future, you might accidentally convince yourself they’ll happen, and then when something goes wrong, you’ll be even more crushed. If you demanded that I explain this, I wouldn’t say anything about the evil eye. But it just feels right to me to keep in mind, at all times, that it’s a bad idea to talk too much about future good things. I had never thought of this personality quirk as Jewish-certainly we never talked about the evil eye in my very secular family. While not a superstitious person in general, I am wary of talking about possible good things in the future without layers and layers of hypothetical statements. I started thinking about the word “jinx” today when a friend on twitter was surveying people about (1) whether they held with the superstition that it’s bad luck to talk about good things that might happen (in general, or specifically attracting the evil eye) and (2) whether they were Jewish.
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