Dana Lammers, ape 10, of Sioux Center, Iowa, for her question:

What does superstition mean?

The "super" part of this word means "over" or "above." The rest of the word superstition was borrowed from an older word that meant "to stand" or "to stare." True, there is nothing there to make us think of Halloween witches and spooky bogeymen. But the whole word superstition means something to protect us, just in case the witches and bogeymen decide to get really nasty. It recommends a rabbit's foot or a four leaf clover to avoid all sorts of miserable things and to bring us only pleasant things.

Nowadays, nobody believes that a witch can do you in, just by staring at you with her evil eye. The only witches we know about are real children dressed up for a merry old time at Halloween. But in the olden days, people did believe that there were witches who had all sorts of magical powers to harm ordinary folk. This was a superstitious belief because it is not true and it never was.

However, a ghastly idea can scare a person silly, whether it is really true or not. In the olden days, people figured a way to cope with their magical witches. They invented their own magic to protect themselves from witch's magic. This magic against magic is the story of superstition. There is not much sense to it because witches never existed and nothing ever worked by magic. The whole idea is rather silly, but people like it. Perhaps they really wanted to believe in magic. In any case, they have invented at least a million superstitious ideas.

Nobody knows when an accident will happen or when to expect bad news. These miserable events seem somewhat like witch's magic, perhaps because we did nothing to deserve them. Some people call this sort of thing bad luck. And everybody, of course, wants only good luck to happen all the days of their lives. We cannot be sure this will happen, so we go back to the old superstitious idea of using magic to get more magic.

We carry a rabbit's foot or a four leaf clover for good luck. When we spill the salt, we toss a pinch of it over the left shoulder. In the olden days, salt was as precious as jewels and spilling it was a tragic waste. Somebody invented a magic trick to avoid this bad luck    and we still practice this old superstition. We don't walk under ladders, but not because the person aloft might drop his bucket of paint.

We walk around ladders because an old superstition says that bad luck will befall us if we walk under them.

Superstitions never went out of style and even nowadays, almost everybody secretly does a few magical things, either for good luck or to shoo away bad luck. When somebody catches us, we pretend we are kidding because deep down, most of us know that magic cannot do a thing for us or against us. Some people really still believe in magic and practice all sorts of superstitious doings. This is too bad, because they are too busy to enjoy the honest to goodness things that really happen to them.