Old Wives Tales- Do You Remember Any?

[Pappy]

Thumb sucking causes buck teeth.

 

[Rakaia]

Going outside with no hat causes colds

If your feet are cold, put a hat on.

 

[Pepper]

If you give milk for free he won't buy the cow.

 

[Rae]

Drinking coffee as a child will stunt your growth. Also eat all your food because children in Africa are starving. Not sure how that happens.

 

[LoveTulips]

From my maternal grandmother's relatives in Poland, apparently, if you touch a plant while you were on your period, the plant would die.

 

[Radrook]

Don't mention the Devil too many times. He will misunderstand it as an invitation.

 

[Blessed]

don't do anything with your hands above your head while you are pregnant.. It can cause the cord to twist around the babies neck. Guess who had her hands up a lot and guess who had to have an emergency c section. Most important thing is who got to say I told you so, my mother!

 

[EmptyCup]

"Don't crack your knuckles! It'll make your joints big." It doesn't...

We were told it would give us arthritis. My brother was constantly cracking. No arthritis yet.

 

[Della]

Eating your crusts will give you curly hair
Didn’t work.

My dad was always after me to eat my crusts, but he always told me it would put hair on my chest.

 

[Rose65]

View attachment 374793

That makes great sense.

 

[oldman]

Old Amish saying:
“When you speak, always remember that God is one of your listeners.”

Old Pennsylvania Dutch saying:
"We get too soon old and too late smart."

 

[Fyrefox]

Now this one’s kind of macabre and freaky, but my mother always held that you should never count the number of cars in a funeral procession, because that would be the number of years that you had left to live!

Hearing this as a child didn’t help any with my fears of cemeteries and nuns! A funeral procession in a cemetery with nuns in attendance would have been my perfect trifecta…

 

[jujube]

Finding a penny 'face up' or a four leaf clover, will bring you good luck.

My grandma used to say that if you DIDN'T pick up a penny you saw, you were saying that you didn't want good luck.

My horrible 4th grade teacher told me that if I bit my nails and swallowed the fragments, they'd go directly to my appendix and it would burst and I'd probably die.

Being a terrible nailbiter, I lived in constant fear of that happening.

 

[Fyrefox]

Now just as an aside, why is it that we have “Old Wive’s Tales,” but no “Old Husband’s Tales?”

Or are they there, but as usual, no one’s listening?

Is there grounds there for a class action discrimination suit? Inquiring minds wanna know!


(An old husband, and he has seen some stuff!)

 

[Fyrefox]

My mother had “Old Wive’s Tales” pertaining to different types of food, especially fish. There was the common belief, namely that “fish are brain food,” and presumably would make you smarter…

She also believed that eating pickled herring on New Year’s Eve would bring you good luck for the New Year. I’m dubious about the good luck part, but the pickled herring sure did smell up the house!