THE STERNUTATION RESPONSE
We know why we sneeze. Sneezing (or sternutation) typically happens due to foreign particulate getting inside you and agitating the cilia that fill your face holes. Of course we may also have an allergy or illness that gets our mucous flowing and causes us to “achoo”, expelling unwanted intruders. So then, why do we say things like “God bless you”, “Gesundheit”, or “salud” in response to a sneeze? A cursory search for where and when these sayings came from reveals ancient origins. There appears to have been a widespread belief among many of our ancestors that the act of sneezing imperiled, in some way, one's soul; which may be understandable given how sneezing sounds and feels. It seems to be out of this belief about soul exposure that we came to offering blessings to those who make this particular sound. There's also a often-cited account of an institutional prescription for the God-blessing of sneezers. Identifying the sneeze as a precursor to full-blown dis-ease, in 590 CE Pope Gregory implored Europe's Catholic masses to ward off illness by immediately offering the verbal totem “God bless you” to anyone heard sneezing. This was attempted pandemic prevention through public inoculation by way of the common invocation of divine mercy. A good try, perhaps. While you can track people's logic here it doesn't really make sense. For instance, we say nothing to anyone with other convulsions, expulsion, or sickness precursors or predictors? Nobody has anything to blurt at people with an itch or when I puncture my flesh with a rusty nail? Nothing? And why don't we call out when the person standing in front of us in the grocery queue has bad body odour or passes foul wind? When I come across these folks I'm immediately concerned about their diet, bowel health, and microbiome – often so much so that I want to intervene. Don't you feel the same? Well, surely the least we could do is offer them our well-wishes. No? At the very least, the exclusivity of the sneeze seem silly, don't you think? I think it does. Even this negative connotation with sneezing doesn't quite jive with me. What percentage of your sneezes could reasonably be associated with any kind of sickness? At most ten percent seems right for me. And surely influenza and the common cold are and were far more regular and rampant than plague. No? So how did the sneeze/plague correlation even come up? Further, I don't know about you but I sneeze very loudly and with my whole body, and doing so always leave me feeling wonderfully invigorated. (Unlike some folks, I can't stop or even lessen my sneezes; and I can't imagine why you would.) Sneezing is totally normal and, if anything, means your body is working properly not improperly. As it turns out, a negative association with sneezing isn't and never was universal, even within Europe. It's known that Romans and Greeks considered a good sneeze sign of one's vitality, and not illness. A positive association like this, to me, makes most sense. In all this abundant this light, the persistence of the habit of blessing seems very strange. (At least if it shifted from a response to sneezing to instead calling out the name of God each time someone stepped onto a crowded bus during flu season the phenomena would be more relevant and up to date.) Queerer still is the verbalizing of the thing. What kind of non-omniscient God do you believe in that requires the words to be vocalized and not merely thought? This, it seems to me, would place your God maybe one small step above Cortana or Siri. And then there's the blesser's expectation of being thanked, or their thinking me rude for failing to verbally acknowledge their weird stunt – of publicly insisting that I'm unwell, which is unlikely, while calling down upon me interventions from their personal God. Seems overtly anti-social to me. I mean, why involve me in this? Why not simply say it to yourself and then just feel good about it? In fact, please do. I hereby grant you permission to do so. To be clear, I feel about saying “bless you” in response to a sneeze the way you would feel if upon hearing you hiccough I spat on your shoe. That's just bizarre behaviour, right? Now just imagine if I wanted your thanks for my nonsensical gift of sputum. Bizarre^2. No?
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