Baseball Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson was among the first to use this word in print when he wrote in his Pitching in a Pinch (1912): “A jinx is something which brings bad luck to a ballplayer.” Big Six probably didn’t know that the word may owe its life to a bird called the jynx, which was used to cast charms and spells. The jynx, known in America as the wrynecked woodpecker or wryneck, takes its name from the Greek jynx for the bird. In the Middle Ages this rara avis, with its grotesque, twisted neck, its odd breeding and feeding habits, its harsh, strident cries during migration and its near silence the rest of the time, was thought to have occult powers. As jynx feathers were used to make love potions and black-magic charms, the bird’s name itself came to mean a charm or spell, especially a black-magic spell, cast on a selected victim. It’s easy to see how the slang term jinx arose from jynx, but the long flight of the jynx from medieval times to the printed page of 1912 is not easily explained.