Informant Data:

The informant is a Romanian American who was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1957. At age 19, my informant left Ceausescu’s Romania and arrived in the United States in 1976. She is a real estate agent who currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Contextual Data:

When I was back home one weekend (my home is near USC), my informant asked me to take the trash out. I must confess that I did not take out the trash when my informant asked me to take it out. When night came, and my informant asked if I had taken out the trash, I stood up to take the trash out. My informant stopped me. She told me that I shouldn’t take the trash out night because it means you’re throwing your luck away.

When I asked my informant where she first heard this from, she said she was first told this by her grandmother (who had heard it from her parents) when she was a child living in Bucharest, Romania.

Item:

“Don’t take the trash out at night. You’re taking your luck and throwing it away.”

Analysis:

I believe this superstition perhaps comes from the fact that around a hundred years ago or so in the countryside, more than likely if one were to take one’s trash out at night, one would be risking encountering any of the many wolves, bears, or other dangerous wildlife that live in the vast Romanian wilderness. So even though in suburbia in the present-day, there doesn’t seem to be any risk in taking out the trash at night, the superstition that taking the trash out at night is bad luck must’ve been formed at a point when it was logical to not take the trash out at night, and that it was simply passed down from generation to generation until the danger no longer existed but the superstition still remained.

For another version of this, please see:

“Graveyard Shift/Krusty Love.” Spongebob Squarepants. Writ. Stephen Hillenburg. Dir. Stephen Hillenburg. MTV Networks International, 2002. DVD.

Informant Data:

The informant is a Romanian American who was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1935. At age 37, my informant left Ceausescu’s Romania and arrived in the United States in 1972. She is a skin care specialist who currently resides in Los Angeles, California. She speaks slowly but very impassionedly.

Contextual Data:

When I was over at my house in Santa Monica over the weekend to spend time with my family, and I was having dinner with my family, my sister knocked over the salt shaker and some salt spilled out of it. My informant gasped and told my sister to throw the salt over her shoulder three times. I wanted to see what the reasoning was that made the informant believe that not throwing salt over the shoulder is bad luck as well as possibly know where she learned this folk belief. I asked if I could record her, and she agreed.

When asked who taught her this folk belief, my informant said that it was her mother and that she had taught the informant this when the informant was very young.

Item:

(Audio recording transcribed)

“So if you spill salt, it’s bad. It means there’s going to be a fight in the house. So one way to cure that is that you take salt that you spilled…let’s say you spilled it on the counter or on the table…so you take a little a bit of it, like this with your fingers and you throw it over your shoulder three times. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know why. But that’s a cure for spilling the salt and preventing fighting with somebody.”

Analysis:

Perhaps this folk belief arose from the fact that salt was very valuable since it was important to preserving things before refrigerators or freezers were invented. Because it would’ve been bad to lose something of value, the folk belief naturally arose as an arbitrary way of counteracting the bad luck of wasting something of value.

Informant Data:

The informant is a 19-year old American student who was born in Santa Monica, California in 1996. She’s lived in Los Angeles County all her life with the exception of when she lived in Paris between late August 2014 and mid December 2014. Her father’s ancestry is American as far as back as the founding of the Plymouth Colony in 1621 (but before that, the family is originally from England), and her mother’s ancestry is Romanian. She is a freshman at the University of Southern California and thus currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Contextual Data:

My informant and I arrived at my home in Santa Monica where I placed my backpack on the floor. My informant told me I shouldn’t put my bag on the floor. When I asked her why, my informant told me that when she was visiting her Romanian grandmother to get a facial, her grandmother told her not too put the bag on the floor because that would mean you would become poor. When I asked her why she seemed to believe in it, she told me that it just seemed to make sense that it’s not good leaving bags lying on the floor, so it just seems like a good philosophy.

Item:

“If you put a bag or a purse on the ground that means you’ll be poor.”

Analysis:

I feel like this folk belief is tied to the simple idea that one should value one’s possessions, and that when one leaves something of value on the floor (and purses can often be very valuable, whether it be the purse itself or the money that is likely in the purse), there is underlying idea that the floor is the lowest place you could put a possession. So essentially the belief seems to be really saying that if you don’t value your possessions and you’re careless with them, they in some way lose their worth, and thus make you poor. This belief may have also been originally a warning meant to advise people not place a bag or a purse on the ground specifically when one is outside in order to decrease one’s risk of having their bag or purse stolen.