“Break a leg!” you are to supposed to say on the opening night of the play your friend is acting in.  Or “fall off the stage!”  Both these phrases preserve an ancient superstition.  The gods are jealous and do not approve of too much human happiness, so we had better ask for the opposite of what we truly wish.  Then, when the gods deny the request, everything will be all right.  The custom is pan-European.  The French send actors onstage with Merde!, while Italians say, especially to singers, in bocca al lupo!, “[may you go] into the mouth of the wolf.”  Germans, thorough-going as always, encourage their theatrical or athletic friends with Hals und Beinbruch!, “break your neck and your leg.”

One of our daughters, an early-music soprano living and performing in Germany, has told us of yet another good-luck wish, this one exchanged between opera singers before a performance.  Backstage, waiting for their entrances, they say to each other “toi toi toi!”  This is stylized spitting, as suggested by the alternative form of the ritual, in which you rapidly make a spitting sound over a fellow singer’s shoulder.  One might say that “toi toi toi” bears the same relation to actual expectoration as an air kiss does to osculation.  And why spitting?  Perhaps it is a way of banishing devils, including the devil who makes you forget your lines or start coughing just when your aria begins.  If such superstitiousness seems unlikely in the twenty-first century, don’t take my word for it; go to one of the HD screenings of a Metropolitan Opera performance, listen to the intermission feature during which divas exchange pleasantries, and you will almost certainly hear someone say “toi toi toi.”

A few years ago I took part in a college production of The Pirates of Penzance, and just before curtain on opening night I told the rest of the cast—not too professorially, I hope—about “toi toi toi.”  Perhaps because the phrase’s silliness seemed to match the lyrics of W. S. Gilbert himself, it was thereafter heard regularly in the green room before we went off to sing and dance.  Like most teachers, I took a certain pride in telling the young important things, things about literature or the academic pursuit or the meaning of life, but I confess to a particular pleasure in having taught them this one highly unimportant, slightly mysterious, and deeply traditional thing, a phrase with no usefulness except insofar as it spits in the face of Misfortune and brings good luck.