TOP TEN SUPERSTITIONS THAT NEEDED TWEAKING BEFORE GOING MAINSTREAM

10) Walking under a ladder will bring you bad luck. For a while they tried all kinds of variations: skipping under a canopy, trotting under a doorway... crawling under a Clydesdale. But in the end a casual walk under an easy-to-tote portable ladder really won people over.

9) The horseshoe as a symbol of good luck. Initially women's stadium pumps were being considered but the judges opted for more heft.

8) Breaking a mirror brings seven years of bad luck. Was originally ten years with five off for good behavior but was deemed too lenient forcing them to rethink and go with a solid seven.

7) A rabbit's foot brings good luck. For years it was actually the dodo's foot. Ya' know, until that whole extinct thing kicked in.

6) Step on a crack and break your mother's back. As bad as that sounds, the earlier version, "Sleep on a bed and your mom ends up dead" was demonstrably worse.

5) A black cat crossing your path is bad luck. Interestingly, a black cat encounter originally meant expect guests to drop by uninvited for dinner armed with a really good bottle of red but was dropped for being "so random".

4) Finding a four leaf clover is lucky. For a brief time poison ivy had the honor but... ah, hell, you can see where this is going.

3) Bad news comes in threes. From day one it was slated to come in fours until number three's offering, "That drink you just downed?... yeah, it's laced with strychnine" altered plans.

2) Knock on wood to avoid misfortune. Formerly, wood was knocked on to help alleviate one's troubled thoughts of emptiness, despair and gloom emerging from the nothingness of silence... But then whistling was invented.

And the top ten superstition that needed tweaking before going mainstream:

1) It's bad luck to open an umbrella indoors. At the outset no one considered it bad luck at all... until that rash of eye poking incidents.