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Information Wishbone:
Pre-400 B.C., Etruria



Two people, making secret wishes, tug on opposite ends of the dried, V-shaped clavicle of a fowl. For the person who breaks off the larger piece, a wish comes true. The custom is at least 2,400 years old, and it originated with the Etruscans, the ancient people who occupied the area of the Italian peninsula between the Tiber and Arno rivers, west and south of the Apennines.

A highly cultured people, whose urban civilization reached its height in the sixth century B.C., the Etruscans believed the hen and the cock to be soothsayers: the hen because she foretold the laying of an egg with a squawk; the cock because his crow heralded the dawn of a new day.

When a sacred fowl was killed, the bird's collarbone was laid in the sun to dry. An Etruscan still wishing to benefit from the oracle's powers had only to pick up the bone and stroke it (not break it) and make a wish; hence the name "wishbone."

For more than two centuries, Etruscans wished on unbroken clavicles. We know of this superstition from the Romans, who later adopted many Etruscan ways. Roman writings suggest that the practice of two people's tugging at a clavicle for a larger half sprang from a simple case of supply and demand: too few sacred bones, too many people wishing for favors.

In all, we have inherited more than the Etruscan wishbone superstition. Etymologists claim that the expression "get a lucky break" initially applied to the person winning the larger half in a wishbone tug-of-war.



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