Macedonians have a superstition that putting your bag on the floor gives you bad luck with money, so you’ll never earn much.
I carry a bike messenger bag with me everywhere because the idea of being without a book or two on my person for even a moment fills me with horror.
I very rarely set that bag down anywhere else than the floor. It gets Macedonians all out of sorts.
I guess I’m doomed to several decades of poor earnings.
Good thing I’ve been planning my life around the gentle poverty of a grad student budget anyway.
things are better if i stay
so long and goodnight
so long and goodnight
Tags: customs, grad school, macedonianness
flickr
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link
http://polysemic.org/wp-trackback.php?p=519
May 11, 2009 at 11:53 pm
cwest
my hairdresser back in the states also believes this and for this reason, she never lets me put my purse on the floor - but like you, it’s almost natural for me to put any bag on the floor or ground
May 12, 2009 at 4:17 pm
David
When I was in Russia, I tried to invent my own ad hoc system of Russian transliteration based on Polish (Slavic language with Roman alphabet, but with few diacritics). Needless to say, it confused the hell out of my Russian friends and I was soon writing 4 for ch and w for sh like everyone else.
You’ll find some academic articles with Russian transliterated with Czech and Polish script, though.
Minor point: Macedonian wasn’t “always” written with Cyrillic. Before the alphabet was settled in the 1950’s, Macedonian could be and was written in any number of alphabets, including Latin, (Bulgarian, Serbian and Russian) Cyrillic and Greek. Would have been cool if they had stuck with Greek letters.
May 12, 2009 at 4:26 pm
polysemic
Macedonian dialects weren’t always written with Cyrillic, very true (there’s the famous “Let’s Learn Macedonian” book the Greece government produced with a Latin script, for example) but with the establishment of the standard language, Cyrillic dominated. So that’s what I meant to express by saying Standard Macedonian has always been written in Cyrillic.
March 15, 2010 at 3:29 am
Голубев
а можно себе в блог Вашу статью скопировать? =)
March 15, 2010 at 8:08 am
polysemic
Можно, да =)
Спасибо, что вы спросили!