Friday 13th: Lucky and unlucky numbers

Today is a "Friday the 13th". In some western cultures, this is an unlucky day.

The concept of lucky and unlucky days, and lucky and unlucky numbers, is quite funny. It's something that is often based on superstition. In western culture, it seems like the unlucky number is 13, but in East Asian culture, the number is 4.

There's even a whole Wikipedia article about what they call "tetraphobia"; fear of the number 4. Basically, the word for number 4 (四) sounds very similar (or identical) to the word for death (死) in many dialects of Chinese and various other languages like Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese which have incorporated those Chinese words into their vocabulary (like English has incorporated many French and Latin words into its vocabulary). So the number 4 can be associated with death.

When doing things for other people in these cultures, it's good to know about the unlucky numbers so that you don't inadvertently offend them. However, thinking logically, it is quite implausible for the number 4 itself to be intrinsically unlucky just because of its pronunciation.

I remember bringing 4 water bottles into last year's GAMSAT. It seemed like the right number to last me throughout the whole day; not too little to be dehydrated but not too much to need to go to the toilet too often during the exam. At home, when I thought of bringing 4 water bottles, had a passing thought of ironically bringing an "unlucky" number of water bottles into an exam which could decide whether or not I would enter medicine. But it seems like I got through it well still. That said, my pen saying "Monash University Arts" on it did run out while I was planning my essay (probably more related to the amount of ink there was there originally than bringing in 4 water bottles), but I had some spare pens anyway.

But during the Melbourne interview, I was a bit nervous when we had to choose which interviewing station to start off with. Even though I knew it was just a superstition, I made a conscious decision not to start off at station number 4, even though I had the option to. Now that I look back on it though, it seems like a strange thing to have done. I did like the interviewer I had first up though, who I also had for my last station due to Melbourne's interview format, so it seems to have worked out well. It's unlikely to have been anything to do with the number 4 though. Incidentally, the person who did start off with station 4 did make it into the course.

And now in Medicine, for this semester my CSL and PCP (Principles of Clinical Practice) group numbers all contain a 4 in them. When I received my allocation, I was quite amused with the allocation of two "unlucky" numbers. But then again, it is just superstition, so it's nothing to be worried about.