Triskaidekaphobia

[CaP'N GRuNGe]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskaidekaphobia

 

Origins

Some have proposed that the fear of the number 13 arises from the counting method of ancient humans. This argument states that people counted on ten fingers and two feet (presumably clad in an article of clothing, preventing counting on toes). Anything beyond that countable dozen was unknown and thus suspect. For example, most European languages have distinct names for the numbers one through twelve.

 

Some Christian traditions have it that at the Last Supper, Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, was the 13th to sit at the table, and that for this reason 13 is considered to carry a curse of sorts. However, the number 13 is not uniformly bad in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For example, the 13 attributes of God (also called the thirteen attributes of mercy) are enumerated in the Torah (Exodus 34: 6-7).[1] Some modern Christian churches also use 13 attributes of God in sermons.[2]

 

Fear of 13 has also been linked to that fact that a lunisolar calendar must have 13 months in some years, while the solar Gregorian calendar and lunar Islamic calendar always have 12 months in a year. This fear of the 13 month year has also been associated with fear of the female due to the fact that 13 menstrual cycles comprise one year (13x28=364).

 

Triskaidekaphobia may have also affected the Vikings — it is believed that Loki in the Norse pantheon was the 13th god. More specifically, Loki was believed to have engineered the murder of Baldr, and was the 13th guest to arrive at the funeral. This is perhaps related to the superstition that if thirteen people gather, one of them will die in the following year. This was later Christianized in some traditions into saying that Satan was the 13th angel.

 

The Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1760 BC) omits 13 in its numbered list.[3] This seems to indicate a superstition existed long before the Christian era.

 

See also Friday the 13th for information concerning the traditions and superstitions surrounding this supposedly unlucky day.

 

 

[edit] Examples

 

An elevator without a 13th-floor button.

Rows 12 and 14, with row 13 missing on a Ryanair flight.The arrest and murder of the Knights Templar occurred on Friday October 13, 1307. This event is incorrectly said to be the origin of the supposed unluckiness of Friday the 13th.

In the US and Canada, many tall buildings do not have a floor numbered "13" (see picture at left for an example).

Apollo 13 was launched on 1:13 (13:13).

On some passenger aircraft there is no seating row numbered "13" (see picture at right for an example).

In Formula One and many other racing categories, no vehicle carries the number 13.[4]

Microsoft will not be naming its next Office release as Office 13 (Microsoft shipped Office 12 (a.k.a Microsoft Office 2007) in November 2006) - the working title for the next release of Office (which includes Microsoft Exchange Server) is called Microsoft Office 14.

In Codename: Kids Next Door, the Kids Next Door operative who is numbered 13 is a jinx.

 

[edit] Similar phobias

 

An elevator in a residential apartment building in Shanghai - floor numbers 4, 13 and 14 are missing.Tetraphobia, fear of the number 4 — in Korea, China, and Japan, it is not uncommon for buildings (including offices, apartments, hotels, hospitals, etc.) to have no 4th floor, and sometimes no floor having the digit 4 (14, 41, etc.) at all. Similarly-numbered rooms are also often omitted in any given floors in buildings. The Rio Suites Hotel in Las Vegas has 41 floors, but no 40th or 41st floor. The top two floors are numbered 50 and 51. Here it is only when 4 would be the first digit of a two-digit floor number that it is skipped, while they did not skip the 4th, 14th, 24th, or 34th floors. It is common to find no block number ending in 4 in residential complexes. The Chinese pronunciation for the words "die" and "four" are similar, save for the tone: "Die" and "four," in Mandarin Chinese, are si3 and si4, respectively, and a similar situation occurs in Cantonese. In extension, the Japanese pronunciation (shi, for both 'death' and 'four' with no tone differences) and Korean pronunciation of these two words derived from Chinese, causing the three cultures to share the same fear for the number four. Interestingly, 3 is often considered a lucky number in these cultures since the word "three," pronounced "san," is similar to the pronunciation of the word "live" or "survive" in Chinese and Korean. Thus sometimes the block number 3A would be in place where the block 4 should be in some residential complexes.

 

In Italian culture, the number 17 is considered unlucky. When viewed as the Roman numeral, XVII, it can be re-arranged as VIXI, which in Latin means "I have lived", the perfect tense, implying "My life is over." (c.f. "Vixerunt", Cicero's famous announcement of an execution.) In Italy, it is not uncommon to notice that buildings do not have a 17th floor, or hotels do not have a room 17. The Italian airline carrier Alitalia does not have a row 17 on its aircraft, and neither does German carrier Germanwings, which flies to many Italian destinations. Renault sold its R17 model in Italy as R177.

 

Paraskevedekatriaphobia is the fear of Friday the 13th, which is considered to be a day of bad luck in English, German, Polish and Portuguese-speaking cultures. In Spanish-speaking cultures, it is Tuesday the 13th that is considered unlucky.

[Big John]

:ahem:

[CaP'N GRuNGe]

:ahem:

 

 

I should have known.

[Savage Beatings]

Congratulations on copying Big John's 13,000th post!

[CaP'N GRuNGe]

And that was just about exactly 2 years ago...during which time you have added another 17K + posts.

[Ursa Majoris]

:ahem:

Didn't I use that word in a landmark post once? One of those Huddlers Names things, I think?

[Big John]

Didn't I use that word in a landmark post once? One of those Huddlers Names things, I think?

You put an "anti" in front of a form of that word.

[Ursa Majoris]

You put an "anti" in front of a form of that word.

 

My post is later than yours.