“I wish they would just bring back—gesundheit,” my daughter Jenny sniffled.
We were in the heart of allergy season, and since both she and I are allergy sufferers, the “Bless yous” were flying thicker and faster than the “Like, you knows” at her daughter’s sleepovers.
“Really?” I said. “After a sneeze, you think hauling in a bit of German would clear up the waters?”
It’s not that, she explained. It’s just that flinging a blessing after a sneeze seemed a bit outdated.
After all, historically the “Bless you” was intended to smooth your soul’s return to your body, since ancient folk believed that your soul was blasted from your mouth with every sneeze and it needed all the help it could get to protect it from the evil demons that lurked around fields of ragweed, just waiting for you to let ‘er rip.
Swapping it out for gesundheit, she felt, made more sense, because gesundheit means “good health.” And since a sneeze might signify something even more dire than an allergy, good health would seem to be a more fitting and modern wish to offer.
Besides, when you say “Bless you” after a guy sneezes, might you be treading on his constitutional rights? After all, this is America, where blessing a person’s soul with every a-choo might violate some kind of separation of church and sneeze.
But still, I thought, is it really an improvement to turn to gesundheit? It’s OK to bring in a German named Klinsmann to coach our national soccer team, because we need all the help—and maybe even blessings—we can get in that department. But when you’re mining for expressions of polite social discourse, is Germany really the mother lode you would turn to?
For the record, my daughter is a very polite young lady, though I guess you might call it politeness 2.0, which is the social operating system among those a generation or more younger than I am.
A few weeks ago, when I wrote a column lamenting about how “You’re welcome” seems to have slipped from grace among today’s young folk—swapped for less formal expressions like “No problem,” or “Don’t mention it,” or “My pleasure”—Jenny disagreed with me.
“When I hear people say ‘You’re welcome,’” she said, “it almost sounds as if they did something nice because they expected to be thanked. By contrast, when I hear someone say, ‘No problem’ or ‘Don’t mention it,’ it seems as if they’re saying that no thanks is necessary, because none is expected.”
That’s the tack she takes whenever she is thanked.
It was a good point, so I thanked her for her input. But I did it in the old-fashioned way because I wasn’t sure if the modern alternative to “Thank you” was “Props” or “Fo-shizzle.” There’s nothing less cool than an old guy trying to sound hip by mangling modern slang, nome sane?
“Besides,” she said about the whole blessing response to a sneeze, “who wants to have his sneeze acknowledged? You just want to get past a sneeze and get on with your life, right? Why call attention to it? You might as well offer a pleasantry for anybody returning from the bathroom.” She flashed a bright smile and a double-thumbs-up to demonstrate. “Way to go!” she chirped.
Good point, I thought—though I think I’d prefer my potty pleasantry to be a thumbs-down and a hearty “Boom-shakka-lakka!”
“And then what?” she said. “After you bless me for my sneeze, I thank you for your blessing? And then you tell me ‘You’re welcome’ for thanking me? How do you go back and pick up the thread of a conversation after all that?”
Again, a good point. But I didn’t thank her for it, because she was on a roll, and I didn’t want to break her stride. Besides, I couldn’t remember what topic we had been talking about when she shattered it with a sneeze.
Anyway, although all her points make sense, I don’t think I’ll start speaking in tongues when you sneeze, because if you don’t know German there’s no telling how you’ll react if I lay a gesundheit on you.
And I don’t know if I’d be able to give up on blessing you when you sneeze anyway, because it was drilled into me at an early age, and it leaps from my mouth before I realize it’s on its way. I’m afraid I’ll blow an O-ring or something if I try to pinch it off and change it in mid-blessing.
I’ve found myself saying it several times since that conversation with Jenny, but now, as soon as it blurts from my mouth, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing.
So if you happen to sneeze in my presence and you hear my knee-jerk “Bless you” pop out even before the room has stopped echoing from your sneeze, forgive me.
Because what I really meant to say was, “Boom-shakka-lakka—fo shizzle!”
