Touch wood or Knock on wood? God bless you?

Touch wood or Knock on wood? God bless you?

The effigy of a crusader knight, carved in wood around 1280, can be found in Southwark Cathedral, London. He has a shiny nose for a reason…

Another hangover from our distant past, at least in Britain, “knocking on wood” or “touch wood” (the usual phrase and action for speakers of English) is the action of literally touching, tapping, or knocking on wood, or at least stating that you are doing or intending to do so.
It’s invoked in order to avoid “tempting fate” after making some favourable prediction or boast, or a declaration concerning your own death or another unfavourable situation.

So the story goes, medieval knights being sent into battle would visit the wooden effigy of a knight in Southwark Cathedral and touch its nose for luck. The Knight’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales begins in Southwark for this reason. The effigy can still be seen in the cathedral to this day.

The origins of the superstition is much older. It derives from the pagan belief that malevolent spirits inhabited wood, and that if you expressed a hope for the future you should touch, or knock on, wood to prevent the spirits from hearing and presumably preventing your hopes from coming true.

Somebody sneezes and you say “bless you”. A familiar event but the practice is believed to have originated in the middle ages. The thought was that the act of sneezing gave Satan the opportunity to enter the body. The person who sneezed needed God’s help to expel the devil, hence “God bless you”. There was also a belief that you could “sneeze out” your soul which was countered by the “God bless you” or covering the face to hold the soul in.