I just came across a posting from Ken, giving all sorts of ridiculous answers as to where the phrase “break a leg” came from. This was from a while ago, but the answer was so ridiculously wrong, I need to say SOMETHING about it.
“Legs” in theatre are masking of a stage (the pieces on the side that block the audiences view of backstage) which today are usually black cloth, but used to be made of fragile hanging pieces of wood. These pieces of masking are called “legs,” because they are long and slim and come in pairs (one on each side of the stage).
If the audience was enthusiastic enough, at the end of a show they would clap and yell, and scream, and bang on the floor with their feet. Old theatres usually held close to 1,000 in close proximity, and would not be “up to code” if you will. These enthusiams would lead to the legs falling from where they were hung, and cracking.
So, if you broke your stage’s legs, it meant that your show was a hit and you will get paid (even today a concern for theatre artists), and thus the yearning for broken legs.
I’m sorry, but your explanation sounds very unlikely to me. I’ve never heard any theatre people refer to the curtains at the wings as “legs”, and never heard of old theatres hanging pieces of wood there instead. That seems unlikely on the face of it, since simple curtains do fine (especially if the wooden pieces were prone to collapse).
In fact, the wooden “leg” thing sounds like a ridiculous, contrived, needlessly complicated “explanation” of something very simple (like the story about the raised middle finger originating at Agincourt; one still comes across this bit of nonsense now and again).
Actually, I’d bet about eighteen thousand dollars that “break a leg” is a simple ironic statement, the kind of black humor that has always been part of theatrical camarderie.
Oh, and welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board.
This pretty much squares with what the folks over at the American Dialect Society think also. I hang out there quite a bit, and you just can’t find this saying very far back. You’d sure expect it to exist in print in at least one instance if it came from the turn of the century or earlier.
You say the masking “used to be” made of hanging pieces of wood. Do you know when this was? Are we talking 20th century, 19th or 16th? Ken notes the phrase is first found in print in the early 1900’s, so anything dating much further back than that is unlikely to the be cause.
The same page mentions, “There are various other explanations to the effect that it really refers to bending the leg during a bow or to the curtains pulls that were allegedly called “legs,” the opening and closing of the curtains during numerous curtain calls could result in the curtain pulls breaking, or so one might wish. These are also undoubtedly false. The origin is far more likely to be simple superstition, not wanting to bring on a jinx.” And goes on to note that similar phrases exist in both German (as Ken wrote) and Japanese.
So unless we can find widespread use of breakable “legs” somewhere other than underneath actors in the 20th century, your explanation is most likely incorrect.
I can personally testify that t had made it down to high schools by 1962, so, unless it appeared in a movie or something of the sort between 1957 and 1962, it would almost have to be older than 1957.