Working healthcare, I tell all other healthcare / first responders “I hope you have a boring shift” (every once in a while a younger person objects, but they are almost immediately hushed / corrected by their senior coworker).
But it occurs to me that many office / sedentary workers might not find this to be a blessing. What would I say to a desk worker that might be equivalent?
Whistling comes from when whistling was used to communicate to stagehands to lower and lift the various backdops that used sand bags as counterweights. Whistling could cause someone up in the grid to send something down that was heavy, injuring or killing people.
The thing about the Scottish play that you mentioned (which is what most theatre folks call it) is more of an actual superstition, but may well stem from the fact that the play has a lot in it that can cause injury if not done safely, so the thought is that a lot of productions of the play can feel cursed, so that turned into referencing the play feeling cursed.
Is the Scottish play superstition only for theaters which are currently rehearsing/performing that play, or is it an all-encompassing sort of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named situation, where the proper title is never utilized if it can be avoided?
The latter; and it’s taken seriously by many, less seriously by many others. For some, they will never utter the name; others simply don’t say it in a theatre. My wife is well into the second camp, and for example, while explaining it to kids in kids camp at the theatre, was quite willing to say the name.
For me, my main basically hard-and-fast rule is not saying it to actors or techs during rehearsals or productions, but that is mainly because for the ones who DO believe in it, it might make them nervous enough to actually do something that they would attribute to the curse. Placebos have real effects. :)
Fascinating. The first time I ran across the superstition was in a high school English class, in which the teacher would wheel out the TV and her Slings and Arrows dvds whenever she didn’t want to do the lesson. I don’t recall much (other than it being quite funny), but the “curse” of the play (and it’s legitimacy) came up frequently over the course of one of the seasons.
Neat!