Published on 12, July, 2020
Anyone else get mildly irritated when people say "Bless you!" after you sneeze?
For me, it's "Great! Not only was I interrupted by having to sneeze, now you've added the obligation to say 'Thank you' to my troubles!". Also, can we drop the ritualised superstition given that the year starts with a 20?
the "bless you" stems from the middle ages belief that when you sneezed you were vunerable to the devil entering you and as with many sayings its just become common although to be honest i haven't heard it said in a long time since modern society is falling out of favour with religion
Really? I thought the obligation to say ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes started during the plague when if someone sneezed they probably had caught the plague so you said ‘bless you’ to them as they were going to die shortly.
you could be right its hard to know for sure after so long though im pretty sure i read that in a history book plus the bubonic plague wasn't really pnuemonic it was more of a fever sepsis vomitous kind of disease so coughing wasn't really a big part of it generally
far from it kitsun you quite rightly correct me to say it wasn't pnuemonic was incorrect what i meant was sneezing wasn't a side effect associated with the plague definitely not your bad more a case of we were neither wrong nor right but somewhere in between
To be fair actually thinking about it (rather than relying on myths) the bacteria that causes the plague, Yersinia Pestis causes 3 types of plague, bubonic; septicaemic and pneumonic, decided by the bacteria’s mode of entry to the body. While the pneumonic version would definitely have caused coughing it probably wouldn’t have caused sneezing so you were probably right about the origins of the term ‘bless you’. My bad!
We may never know it’s exact origin due to the time lapse but somewhere in the Middle Ages sounds good.