Rant #1,313: Triskaidekaphobia

I will bet that most of you do not know what this word means, and if I didn't look it up, I probably wouldn't have figured it out either.

Triskaidekaphobia means the fear of the number 13 and the avoidance in using it.

It is the perfect word to describe this blog today, as it it the blog's 1,313 post.

And it comes during the Halloween season, which is pretty neat how that worked out.

The only better thing would have it to have happened on a Friday the 13th or at least on the holiday itself.

I came close to doing that.

But back to triskaidekaphobia ...

If you think that people don't have a fear of the number 13, I have news for you, many, many people do have this fear.

For instance, in real estate, many builders have skipped the 13th floor in their elevated buildings, going right to floor 14 from floor 12.

The number 13 has become to be something so negative that people shiver on Friday the 13th, and a whole movie franchise has come out of this fear of that number.

I can tell you that in the Jewish religion, the age of 13 is when a boy is thought to become a man, and bar mitzvahs are generally held at this age, although one can have a bar mitzvah--or bat mitzvah--really at any age beyond 13 (and 12 for girls). Thus, it is a lucky number among Jewish folk.

But the number 13 is feared by many.

Me, I do not have triskaidekaphobia, so I am very happy that this blog has reached another milestone, number 1,313.

We now have the same number of posts as the number of where the Munsters lived, 1313 Mockingbird Lane.

They scared a lot of people because of how they looked, but most of us laughed at this show, and still do all these years later.

13 is an odd number--it really is--and if you either add or subtract the digits, you get an even number, as in 3+1=4 or 3-1=2.

I have no idea if that has any significance at all, just thought I would throw it in for good measure.

So 1,313 it is.

I would have preferred if it fell on the actual holiday of Halloween, which is tomorrow, of course, but I have to say that it is remarkable that we came so close to doing that.

Maybe it was luck that we came close, or bad luck that we didn't.

Maybe the number 13 does have some negatives attached to it.

I happen to like the number.

And tomorrow, we will have what I guess I will call a "successive" number, Rant #1,314, like 13 comes just before 14.

I wonder if that has any significance at all.

Probably not.