“Lucky Saliva”
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Hello everyone,
Day 12 of the epic German learning Advent Calendar, and after we did an exercise yesterday, today it’s time for another a really cool colloquial vocabulary treat, that’s absolutely worth adding to your active vocabulary
Toi, Toi, Toi
The French speakers among you now might be all excited like:
“Moi, moi, moi? Quoi, quoi, quoi?”
but the German “word” toi has nothing to do with French and it’s not pronounced the French way.
So what is it?
Well, most likely, it is an onomonop… uhm… an onamot… it’s a a verbal imitation of a sound and the sound it’s supposed to imitate is … drumroll… the sound of spitting over someone’s shoulder three times.
I mean… the soft spitting, like when you spit a gum or a small hair that’s on your lips.
And now the big question is, why on earth you’d need a verbalized version of the sound of spitting over someone’s shoulder three times.
And the answer is of course: superstitions!!
In many cultures, there used to be a believe that spitting is a way to keep away evil spirits and in Germany, the specific believe was that you spit over someone’s shoulder three times to keep the devil from creeping up. If you’re now like “Eww, gross.” then you’ll LOVE some other variants of this. Like, softly spitting into someone’s face that you admire. I’ll link a Wikipedia entry below, if you want to learn more :)
But yeah, in Germany, you’d spit over someone’s shoulder to ward of evil spirits, and while the act itself has disappeared because of “mAnNeRs”, the verbal imitation is an extremely common way to wish someone “Good luck” .
- “Morgen ist mein Deutschtest”
“Oh, na dann toi toi toi.”
“Danke!!” - “Tomorrow, there’s going to be my German test.”
“Oh, well then, here’s me verbally spitting over your shoulder.”
“Danke!!” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Now, what’s important is that toi, toi, toi is used in contexts where there are some stakes. They don’t have to be big, but there needs to be a “negative effect” for you if things don’t go well.
So for example in the mall, when the electronics store has a wheel of fortune and you can win a gift card, saying toi toi toi wouldn’t really fit, because there’s no stakes.
But for example, when I was playing theater, we’d always say toi toi toi to each other before a show. Actually, we’d even say it over each other’s shoulder and it devolved into a tse tse tse and I was like “Oh man, that sounds more like spitting than toi toi toi.”… I did NOT know the origin of the phrase then :).
But yeah, toi toi toi is the PERFECT thing to say to your friends before some event where they have moderate stakes.
Now, many among you are probably now like “So it’s like the German version of Break a leg, right?”
And it is true that the two share the same overall idea, but at least to me, the two don’t feel the same. toi toi toi feels smaller, more casual, and it is WAY more common, so I think “Good luck!” really is the better translation. The closer German counterpart for “Break a leg.” is “Hals und Beinbruch.” But that’s so extreme, I actually feel weird when I say it.
Anyway, that’s it for today.
Let me know if you have heard toi toi toi before and if you also have spitting superstitions in your country. And of course if you have questions, let me know as well.
Have a great day and bis morgen :)
further reading:
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Thanks for lesson. I enjoyed it. Yes, I first heard the expression in Berlin. Oddly enough, I never learned it after a number of years studying German. Great to know that it’s used in contexts where the person has some stakes. I did not know that.
“Toi, toi, toi” habe ich erst in Hamburg gehört und zwar in 1955. Oft mit Händen auf den Schultern. “Hals und Beinbrück” fand ich viel zu grausam, doch vielleicht typisch deutsch. Und was habe ich dem Klarinettisten Herrn Roland (er war erster Klarinettist im Hamburg-Oper-Orchester) und seinem Begleiter gesagt, als die beide die erste Aufführung meiner Sonate spielten? “Herzlichen Dank.”
Ja, es passt zu den Märchen der Gebrüder Grimm :)
I am in the Theater and I like ‘toi, toi, toi’ better than ‘Break a Leg!’ I compete a lot with my horses so it would just make me cringe hearing this!
Hahhaa, omg yes. In the context of horses, break a leg REALLY sounds odd.
We also have a spitting superstition in Romania and it sounds more like “ptiu ptiu”. It is believed that when you say to someone, usually a child, that they are very beautiful you are attracting evil spirits, so we are saying “ptiu ptiu” to prevent a curse.
Is that pretty much the only situation where people say that, or would you use it in other situations too?
I didn’t know about spitting being the history of toi toi toi but that makes total sense to me.
I work in a theatre in Austria and ‘toi toi toi’ is always how we wish each other good luck before a show. Before premieres we give each other small gifts, which we even call toi tois. As in, “The premiere is tonight so I have to run to Lidl to buy everyone toi tois.
Really superstitious people even get annoyed when you respond with thanks. The “correct” response to toi toi toi is “wird schon schief gehen.”
In Czech theatres they also say toi toi toi, but the correct response is, ‘may the devil take you,’ which I was so confused by the first times I heard it.
Funny, in Russian “break a leg” sounds like “not a down, not a feather to you”, and response cannot be “thank you”, but “go to hell”, otherwise the wish of good luck won’t come true
this is exactly what russians say in response. that’s so interesting!
It’s a well-established etymological fact that “toi toi toi” as well as “Hals und Beinbruch” are German borrowings from Yiddish. “Hals and Beinbruch” is actually how the German ear heard the Yiddish Hazlacha un Bracha (Luck and Blessing).
Ich kenne “Toi,toi,toi” = Good luck! Aber auch von den öffentlichen Toiletten …
Haha, ja, die Plastiktoilettenhäuschen… da denke ich auch jedes Mal “Toi toi toi, dass das sauber ist.”
In Russia, we have a similar superstition where we vocally imitate 3 spits. In Russian, it is “tfu tfu tfu”, which sounds a lot more like spitting in my opinion :)
But we use it slightly differently in Russia: instead of wishing someone luck, you use it when you make a bad prediction about the future, and you don’t want it to come true. So, for example: “I barely learned for my German test, I think I might fail! Tfu tfu tfu”. So when you say that something bad might happen, your friends will often ask you to “spit”, otherwise what you just said might become real :)
Ah, so it’s more like a “God forbid”. The more onomaptopoetic version was “tse tse tse” which then got shaped into “toi”. But “tfu” does sound like spitting indeed.
In the states Jewish people say that when someone says something that you would not like to happen. Example: ” I hope your brakes don’t fail on the way to get them repaired”. The immediate response would be ” Toi, toi, toi”. ( and the act of fake spitting!!) It’s as if you need to spit those words out of the mouth of the person who said it so as to not be jinxed !!
Ah, that lines up with what another comment said about how it’s used in Russia. As a sort of “hedge” or “dispell”.
The Anglophone equivalent would be “knock on wood.”
I’m involved in the opera world in New York and have heard “toi toi toi” many times, but I’d say only in the last decade or so. We usually use the Italian phrases “in bocca al lupo” or “crepi il lupo.” Or the old familiar “break a leg.”
For those who don’t know… “in bocca al lupo” means as much as “in(to) the mouth of a wolf”, as far as I know.
Yes, this is correct. And the response to that is “crepi il lupo” as the previous commenter said, which means “crawl the wolf”
Sorry, crepe il lupo means “let the wolf die”, what was I thinking…
The whole “break a leg” thing seems to have arisen either from a superstition (wish for a bad thing in the hope that a good thing happens instead(*)), and/or perhaps directly from “Hals und Beinbruch” as mentioned in the article above, the latter of which may just(**) derive from the Hebrew “hatzlakha u-brakha”, meaning “success and blessings”.
(*) Speaking of which, I just tripped over the expression “(Es) wird schon schiefgehen”, meaning something like “It’ll turn out OK/it’ll work out OK”, rather than the literal “It’ll go wrong”
(**) ‘twould be just cool enough that you should consider this possibility to be seasoned with a tasty superpo(si)tion/admixture of “Ich will es glauben” and “Wunscherfüllung”. I mean if enough of us quote someone else who’s quoting someone else who’s seen it on the Reader’s Digest home page, who’s quoting someone else who danced with the Prince of Wales, what sort of sad-sack *reality* could possibly stop us?
So German Wikipedia agrees about the origin of Hals und Beinbruch, which I got to say, has to be one of the most “creative” reimaginings of an expression.
“Wird schon schiefgehen” – yeah, this is fairly common actually, but I personally don’t like it (because I don’t like irony) and I NEVER use it, so I forgot about it. I prefer the boring “Klappt schon.”
Auf Französich, sagte man : je touche du bois”,jemanden wünschen, den etwas gelingt.
Bis Morgen .
Ah, davon gibt es auch eine deutsche Version:
“Klopf auf Holz”
Manchmal klopfen die Leute auch einfach auf den Tisch und sagen Toi toi toi.
Opera singers seem to do it at least in live stream from the New York Met Opera ..I never understood it before .. Danke
Actually, just Toi toi.
I mean before musical performances, that is. Toi, toi. Noticed the difference when i came to Germany.
Is it that people say it or are they making the gesture? At the theater group where I would play, we’d do the gesture. Three times left and three times right shoulder.
Wait, do they say it or are they making the gesture?
Die Opersānger*innen machen keine Geste. Sie sagen nur “toi, toi, toi!” Und jetzt weiß ich, woher es kommt. Vielen Dank!
Hallo,
I’ve come across toi toi toi lots of times on German TV, but I had no idea it had something to do with spitting ;)
And yes, I agree it’s a lot less dramatic than “break a leg”, which feels wrong if the situation is really trivial.
Like, if I said “I really hope I can finish this piece of work today” no one would say “break a leg”, but it seems to me toi toi toi wouldn’t be out of place… or am I wrong?
Bis Morgen!
Yeah, toi toi toi would work perfectly in the context you described although I would prefer “Viel Erfolg”. “toi, toi, toi” has slight notion of some “peril” or “risk”. Or at least a notion of “Uhhh, I hope this works”, which for finishing a piece of work is not really what you want because ideally, you’d want to be the only limiting factor why it could fail. Like… full ownership and all.