Folklore: Sign Superstition/Folk Belief , “Dropped, crossed knife, fork, spoon.” folklore

Genre: Sign Superstition/Folk Belief                          

“Dropped, crossed knife, fork, spoon.”                          

                                                                   

1. Sineád Dinsmore, 
September, 8, 2001
2. “Toddy” (Kathleen) Ritter, female                                                        
3. Adrian McGarrity, Irish-born, Irish-English speaking
Oct 6, 2001, in an airplane enroute, Lisbon to London
somewhere over Galicia
4. Neil O’Neill
Dec 7, 2001

We were at my aunt Toddy’s house in Santa Cruz in September. My cousins Sineád, Ceit and I were talking about a family superstitions when we’d drop a knife or a fork. A fork meant a woman, a knife a man and a spoon, a child was to come visiting. 

We decided it was a used as a way of foretelling visitors. And the shapes of the utensils had something to do with their assigned designation. A knife was phallic. A fork had an upper torso, and women traditionally take care of the food preparation. A fork is the principle eating instrument, but babies depend exclusively upon spoons until they train up to forks. The knife is the last to be added to the repertoire.

My Irish informant, Adrian McGarrity, from Belfast, said that he learned from his mother that a fork meant that they would have a woman visitor, a knife meant a man, but they had no connection with the spoon. However he added that “if you cross a knife and fork accidentally, it meant there was going to be an argument or a fight.” 

He also said fighting was also related to an itchy right hand, or nose. I wondered if growing up in a city torn by civil was since 1970 had something to do with the prevalence of fighting images. But he learned these superstitions from his mother, Eleanor Scullion (in her 70s), who grew up in Legoneill, a village outside of Belfast before the Troubles escalated. So they seem to be traditional images.

Scotsman Neil O’Neill said, “if people put two different spoons on top of each other on the same saucer by mistake, it means a christening was coming up. It came from my mother. It’s probably Irish.” His mother lives in Scotland, but is of Irish descent. He thought the superstition had to do with the synchronicity of the event of two people putting the spoons down together like a couple.