2 thoughts on “One small step…”

1. Nice.

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2. To the Master of Toot Sweet:

   “Toi, Toi, Toi”

   “Toi, Toi, Toi” is a phrase to ward off hex spells. It is very much in “toot” with knocking on wood or spitting or imitating the sound of spitting, because in folklore saliva has demon-banishing powers. Yiddishm tov , “good”, is combined with the Old German word for “Devil.” One explanation is that “toi, toi, toi” is the rendition of spitting three times over someone’s shoulder (hopefully missing the person), a gesture to ward off evil spirits. Before a performance, tooters never wish each other good luck, but say “I hope you break a leg. In “A Defence of Superstition”, Irish Robert Wilson Lynd said that tooters are part of a most superstitious institutions . . . right after horse racing. In horse racing to wish a man luck is considered unlucky, so “you should say something insulting, such as “May you break your leg!” Toi, toi, toi too, “break a leg”, is archaic slang for bowing (. . . and who wants to bow to anyone?); placing one foot behind the other and bending at the knee.

   In Ancient Greece, time of the Asstoots, people didn’t clap. Instead, they stomped, to show their appreciation, and if they stomped long enough, sooner or later one of the tooters would break a leg. In Roman times, gladiators would fight to the death as a form of peculiar entertainment. Tooters would sometimes shout “quasso cruris,” “break a leg,” sometimes “good luck” by requesting gladiators keep their lives and only cripple their opponents. Some etymologists believe in the adaptation from Yiddish into German. The phrase “Hatsloche un Broche”, “success and blessing”, had been calqued from the German phrase “Hals- und Beinbruch”, “neck and leg fracture”. It is also said, Manfred von Richthofen, during the First World War, as most pilots of the German Air Force, was using the phrase “Hals- und Beinbruch”, “neck and leg fracture”, to wish the other pilots good luck. The phrase also has been adopted from German into Polish: “połamania nóg”, “breaking of legs,” bvery different from the Mafia, with the word “połamanie,” meaning fracturing, “połamania”. In Polish, “życzyć” “to wish,” roughly translated as “I wish you a fracture of the legs.”

   There you have it:
   Toi, toi, toi . . .

   Lefty.

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