Good luck, bad luck

Have you ever broken a mirror? Let's demystify these 10 superstitions

Do you have rules you follow "just in case"? Some of us avoid walking under ladders, hesitate before opening umbrellas indoors, or instinctively knock on wood after saying something… But

where did these rituals come from? Why did some everyday accidents, animals, or gestures get labeled "unlucky"? Let’s explore some of the answers and whether they have to do with psychology, religion, history, or plain old common sense!

For one, there’s the safety concern: Why would you walk under a ladder if you could avoid the –albeit low– risk of it falling on you?

However, this superstition is also linked to the medieval Christian belief that interrupting a shape resembling a triangle was a way of insulting the Holy Trinity. Again: Why risk it?

Have you ever shattered a mirror and winced at the thought of years of bad luck? This goes back to ancient Greece and Rome. There, reflections were thought to be linked to the soul. Destroying a mirror was considered an affront to the gods watching over your spiritual self.

The "seven years" bit comes from the Roman idea that the human body renewed itself in seven-year cycles.

"You’ll jinx it!" is a common reaction when someone celebrates before their actual birthday. This superstition appears across several European traditions, where marking a milestone before it arrives was seen as presumptuous, even disrespectful to fate.

In eras when illness and mortality were real daily concerns, reaching your birthday wasn’t guaranteed… so celebrating early felt like counting blessings before earning them.

In ancient Egypt, black cats were revered and associated with protection and prosperity. What happened to their reputation, then? Simply put, in medieval Europe, when fear of witchcraft ran rampant, cats (especially the poor black ones) became linked with witches.

However, beliefs vary widely: in Britain, Ireland, and Japan, black cats can signify good luck or fortune, and sailors once welcomed them aboard ships to ensure safe voyages.

In many Western traditions, both Fridays and the number 13 had separate unlucky connotations long before they were combined: Friday was sometimes seen as ill-fated in Christian lore (Jesus’ crucifixion is said to have been on a Friday), and 13 was viewed with suspicion in Norse myth (where Loki’s unexpected arrival as the 13th guest at a feast led to chaos).

When early umbrellas with stiff metal frames first became popular in Britain and Europe, they were hard to fold and easy to jab into furniture, lamps, or unsuspecting family members. That made opening one inside genuinely hazardous, and turning it into a superstition was a tidy way to say, "Please don’t do it."

Almost everyone does this reflexively: you say something hopeful and then tap wood to "keep the luck going." One theory ties this to pagan traditions in Europe, where people believed protective spirits lived in trees; knocking on the trunk was a way to call on those spirits or to secure their goodwill.

Salt was once very precious: it preserved food, flavored meals, and even served as currency in parts of the ancient world. Spilling it meant waste, and waste invited misfortune. But, of course, everyone knows the fix: throw some over your left shoulder.

"Step on a crack, break your mother’s back." This ominous-sounding rhyme isn’t ancient at all; it rose to popularity in the early 20th century, spread through schoolyards rather than folklore. Of course, there is no logical explanation to back it up. But if you are superstitious… why would you risk it?

"One for sorrow, two for joy"... In British and Irish folklore, seeing a single magpie was thought to signal misfortune, loneliness, or bad news. The belief probably just pointed at how unlikely it is to see only one of these beautiful birds. To counter the bad luck, people developed rituals: tipping a hat, greeting the bird politely, or even saluting it.

Beloved lyrics

"For what is a man?": Some of the wisest lyric lines ever written

Paul Anka was terrified when he sat down to write the lyrics for a song that Frank Sinatra would be singing. Jokingly, he started with a dramatic, "And now, the end is near…" The rest is history. Who are the people who pen the words that others will spend decades repeating? How did they come up with words so precise and true that listeners would compare them with those of great philosophers? Here are 10 of people’s favorite lyrics of all time, decoded.

"For what is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has naught." The melody of "My Way" wasn't originally American. It began as a French song called Comme d'habitude, a number about a couple stuck in a stale marriage. Paul Anka heard it on the radio while in France and bought the rights on the spot, before he had any use for it.

That use arrived at a dinner in Miami, when Sinatra told him, almost in passing, that he was quitting the business. Anka flew home, sat down at a typewriter, and spent one night writing lyrics as if Sinatra himself were speaking them. Sinatra recorded it in two takes and later called it his "national anthem," and many agreed; Anka had written the exact words one wants to belt while closing an episode of their life.

In "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)," John Lennon wrote: "Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans." But the phrase originated with American writer and cartoonist Allen Saunders, who published it in a 1957 issue of Reader's Digest ("Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans").

The line outlived everything else about the song, repeated at graduations and eulogies for decades since. Lennon was murdered shortly after the album's release, which means the song now carries a weight of hindsight neither he nor his listeners could have intended at the time.

"How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" A young Bob Dylan wrote "Blowin' in the Wind" in 1962. He later claimed he wrote the entire song in about ten minutes at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, borrowing its melody from the old spiritual "No More Auction Block." He was twenty-one, barely a year into his New York career, and insisted at the time it wasn't a protest song at all.

The song never answers its questions, but keeps asking them. First published in the folk magazine Broadside in May 1962, it became the unofficial anthem of the civil rights and antiwar movements once Peter, Paul and Mary's cover shot to number two on the charts in 1963.

"... is equal to the love you make." This is the last song the four Beatles ever recorded together, and Paul McCartney built it deliberately as a farewell. He gave Ringo Starr his only drum solo in the band's history, a fight McCartney had to win through what he called "gentle persuasion," since Starr detested solos on principle.

For the closing line, McCartney said he'd been thinking about Shakespeare, who often ended a scene with a rhyming couplet so the audience would know it was truly over. Even John Lennon, who generally disliked the Abbey Road medley and rarely praised his old partner's work by 1980, admitted the closing thought was "a very cosmic, philosophical line."

"... but it’s better than drinking alone." "Piano Man", by Billy Joel, narrates a song in which the character is real. Joel wrote it about the six months he spent playing piano under the fake name "Bill Martin" at a Los Angeles lounge called The Executive Room. Even the waitress "practicing politics" was Elizabeth Weber, the woman who'd soon become his wife.

Joel wrote it while hiding out from a record label he was desperate to escape after his debut album flopped. It became a bittersweet anthem that many people love singing with others; it seems like, as the song suggests, singing sorrows together at the bar is better than feeling them at home.

The whole song "Both Sides Now," by Joni Mitchell, is often quoted as a deeply philosophical observation of life. It concludes that some mysteries of life are as unknowable as the clouds, or love, despite accumulating experience.

When she wrote it, Mitchell had recently given up a daughter for adoption after being left by the child's father. She was twenty-three, mid-flight, after a passage in Saul Bellow's novel Henderson the Rain King described its narrator looking down at clouds from an airplane, something human eyes had only been able to do for a few decades. Judy Collins released it first in 1967 and won a Grammy for it; Mitchell's own version didn't appear until her 1969 album Clouds.

Kris Kristofferson’s song, "Me and Bobby McGee", contains one of people’s favorite quotes from song lyrics. Its title came from producer Fred Foster, who suggested Kristofferson write a song about his colleague's secretary, Barbara "Bobbie" McKee.

Its most quoted idea about freedom and loss was inspired, Kristofferson later said, by the final scene of Fellini's La Strada, in which a man realizes too late what he threw away. Roger Miller released it first, but it was Janis Joplin's posthumous 1971 recording, finished mere days before her death, that turned it into a number one hit and an accidental epitaph.

"... and I'm getting older too." Nicks says she wrote "Landslide" in about five minutes, sitting in a rented house in Aspen while her partner and musical collaborator, Lindsey Buckingham, was on tour rehearsing with the Everly Brothers. The song's real subject isn't romance, but the vertigo of watching time pass. She was twenty-seven, broke, working as a waitress and a cleaner, and their duo album had just been dropped by its label.

Looking at the snow on the Rockies, she found herself deciding whether to keep chasing music at all. Three months later, Mick Fleetwood heard Buckingham's guitar work on a demo and invited the pair into Fleetwood Mac, which changed their lives. The song has now aged into an anthem for anyone facing a hinge point in their own life.

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime you'll find you get what you need." Mick Jagger sketched this one alone on an acoustic guitar, calling it "one of those bedroom songs." It closed 1969's Let It Bleed just as the decade's peace-and-love optimism was cracking.

The song is upbeat and simple, and unexpectedly insists on an idea of acceptance or surrender that has more to do with Stoic philosophy than with pop rock optimism. But the listeners liked it, and many quote it often.

"...that's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen worked on "Anthem" for roughly a decade, discarding draft after draft, before it finally appeared on his 1992 album The Future. He wasn't a man given to explaining his own lyrics, having spent years training as an ordained Zen Buddhist monk and generally preferring silence to self-analysis.

But "Anthem" has the clearest statement of a philosophy he'd circled his entire career: that brokenness can give way to grace. It has since been invoked by human rights activists, quoted at protests, and performed at civic ceremonies.