Why do people say “God bless you” after a sneeze?
A sneeze is often caused because I’ve got something up my nose and my body wants it out. So I get a funny twitching in my sniffer, I take a quick breath, and an explosive blast of air shoots out my nostrils. Disgusting? Maybe. But it’s a normal human bodily function. So therefore, why am I not blessed for passing gas? Seems to me that breaking wind or cutting the cheese – or whatever euphemism you want for the expulsion of flatulence – is just as required and is usually as involuntary as a sneeze. Now, there are problems with blessing someone who’s passed gas, since if you bless me, you’ve just incriminated yourself. After all, as we all learned in preschool, “he who first detected it, ejected it”. And “the next person who speaks” is indeed “the person who reeks”. At least with sneezing, it’s obvious who committed the act. So we have the aforementioned “God bless you”. What does this mean? Why the blessing? Why is this so necessary? I know several people who aren’t particularly religio
