Jonah in Sailors' Superstition
A long-established expression among sailors uses the term "a Jonah" as meaning a person (either a sailor or a passenger) whose presence on board brings bad luck and endangers the ship. Later on, this meaning was extended to "a Jonah" referring to "a person who carries a jinx, one who will bring bad luck to any enterprise." An example of a so-called "Jonah" would be that of the sailor in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, who was cursed to be lost at sea after he killed an albatross.
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Famous quotes containing the words jonah and/or superstition:
“Why need Christians be still intolerant and superstitious? The simple-minded sailors were unwilling to cast overboard Jonah at his own request.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The superstition respecting power and office is going to the ground. The stream of human affairs flows its own way, and is very little affected by the activity of legislators. What great masses of men wish done, will be done; and they do not wish it for a freak, but because it is their state and natural end.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)