Witch's Shot

Yesterday was a day of mishaps. It began, for me, at lunch when -- while picking up a morsel of food with my chopsticks -- a glob of red curry sauce splashed directly into my right eye. The chile in the sauce made this a remarkably painful experience, although fortunately I was sitting right by a bathroom and so was able to quickly rinse out my eye with cold water.

Fast forward to the early evening, when Sage and I got ready to head out for her weekly cello lesson. First, as I was descending our narrow staircase carrying her cello, I whacked my knee against a banister post. Then, when we were about halfway on our walk to the bus stop I realized that Sage's bow and its box were not in the outside of her cello case. Our timing was already tight to make the bus, so I had Sage walk on to the bus stop while I ran back home. Back home I found the box, but no bow. Mystified, but with no time to search further, I jumped on my bike and cycled back towards Sage carrying the empty bow box. (It turned out that I had put the bow in her cello case, but it was not visible because it was not in its normal box ... .)

We were now running late, but fortunately just as I reached the bus stop where Sage was waiting, a number 203 bus pulled up. Relieved, we jumped on. It was only a couple of stops later that it dawned on me that we didn't actually want the 203 bus (which is their normal bus number for school), but rather a number 5 bus. So we had to disembark from the 203 at the next stop and wait for a number 5 bus to come along.

After (finally) getting on the correct bus, and then taking the train in the direction of Osaka, we made it to the cello studio only about 10 minutes late, only to find the place deserted and the lights all off. Puzzled, I used my newly acquired cellphone to call Sage's teacher. It turned out that he had been forced to cancel the lesson at the last minute because of sudden back problems. He did not have my phone number, so he had emailed me. So there was nothing for Sage and I to do but to turn around and make the long journey back home. On returning home and checking email, I found that his email had come through literally 2 minutes after we had made our original departure from home!

The teacher's email also had a puzzling phrase. He wrote, "I have had a strained back. Witch's shot?"

Despite the proximity to the Setsubun festival, and all the demons that have been out and about, it seemed unlikely that Sage's cello teacher had been shot by a witch. So what could this phrase mean? A bit of internet research revealed, firstly, that "Witch's Shot" is a Japanese punk band.

This didn't seem relevant to the present context, but then I discovered that "witch's shot" is also a literal translation (hence the teacher's "?") of a Japanese phrase, gikkuri goshi, which does indeed mean a strained back / slipped disc / etc.

Intriguingly, this same literal translation also appears in German, where the word is "Hexenschuss." I have no idea if this is just a coincidence, or whether there is some pathway from the German to the Japanese usage (or vice-versa).

As a final piece of the puzzle, the term "witch's shot" also turns up in Old English. Here is an excerpt from the book The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver:

Here you can see how "haegtessan" in Old English morphs into "Hexen" in German.

So much for etymology. We wish Sage's cello teacher a speedy recovery, and Sage and I were glad to make it home without any further mishaps.

Incidentally, one of the few positive things to come out of the evening was that we stumbled upon a cafe near the cello studio where you can pet cats and hedgehogs while drinking your hot beverage, but that will have to be a story for another time ... .