In the song “Let There Be Love”, Nat King Cole includes - in his recipe for a perfect world – a request for “someone to bless me whenever I sneeze.” But why? If you investigate, you’ll find various theories to explain why we say “Bless you!” to sneezers. In the second part of this article, I’ll tell you why I think they’re all wrong.
To bless, or to give your blessing, can cover a range of actions from making something holy, or calling for the application of divine Grace in someone’s (or something’s) favour, to simply approving of, or thanking, him, her or it.
When someone does something cute, or adorable, or kind, like bringing you a cup of tea when you’re tired and thirsty, you might say “Bless you!” without any pretence to being the Pope, and more and more these days a standard indulgent response to third-person cuteness, instead of “Bless him!” or “Bless her!” is the simple “Ohhh! Bless!”
The adjective “blessed” in the context of Christianity - as used to describe the Virgin Mary for example – has two syllables: /'blesɪd/. If you feel lucky or favoured, divinely or cosmically, you may describe yourself as “blessed” with only one syllable (/blest/); if you want to be a “glass-half-full” person, and – instead of complaining that your salary’s pathetic and your children sullen and rude – decide to be thankful that you have a job and a family, you are “counting your blessings”, and the painful throat infection that prevented you from being at work on the day that a dead albatross fell through the ceiling of your office, was, you realize afterwards, “a blessing in disguise”.
None of which helps to explains why, when you sneeze, an English-speaker will say “Bless you!” They don't find it cute, they don't wish to sanctify you, and you can't approve of a sneeze.
The traditional explanation of the “Bless you” response is that it originated in times of plague, when the sneeze was an early sign of the onset of an inevitably fatal disease, which would prompt the hearer to pray to God for the sneezer's soul. The account that seems to currently be most common attributes the origin of the phrase to Pope Gregory in the 6th Century.
Why a habit initiated by an Italian-speaking Pope, in Rome, at a time when the Anglo-Saxon language was in its infancy, should have influenced a current usage in English, but none of the other major European languages (neither Italians nor French people, nor the Spanish, will attempt to bless you when you sneeze), is a mystery to me. There is also the problem that research has suggested that sneezing was not a key symptom of any of the plagues that ravaged Europe between the 6th and 17th centuries.
I think there is a much more obvious explanation. Let's get back to our European neighbours, all of whom have automatic responses to a sneeze, but none of whom bless. Maybe they can offer us a clue to the reason for our strange custom:
Germans and Italians respond to a sneeze with their words for “health”: respectively “Gesundheit!” and “Salute!” This seems fairly logical: we know that a person who sneezes may not be very well, so we wish them good health. But what of the Spanish, who, when sneezed at, shout “Jesus!”?
Try saying those responses. Remember to get the guttural Spanish “jota” sound in “Jesus”, with the stress on the second syllable. What do you notice? Sibillant “s”/“z” sounds and plosive consonants, that's what. Quite like the sounds that come out of our mouths when we sneeze.
What we are forgetting when we subscribe to those unlikely explanations of “Bless you” is that semantics is really a small part of understanding communication. What we do instinctively when someone sneezes is respond sympathetically with an echo response. We shape these sounds that we have heard from the sneezer into recognizable words that convey a sympathetic message, but the sounds come first. It just happens that it Italian “Benedica!” would sound less sneeze-like than “Salute!”, and in English “Health!” lacks the plosive/sibillant aural impact of “Bless you!”
If you're not convinced by this argument, consider the normal French response to a sneeze, which translates as “To your wishes!” No other language offers a similar message: what have the sneezer's wishes or desires got to do with health or benedictions?
Well let's listen to what the French actually say:
“A tes souhaits!”
An English transliteration (please excuse me for this, Francophones) looks like this: “A teh sweh!”
Now look at one of the ways we commonly represent the sound of a sneeze in English: “Atishyoo!”
Notice the similarity?
Sometimes we forget that, before grammars, definitions and etymologies, language is born out of primal communication instincts, and each piece of communication starts out as, in the words of writer Anthony Burgess, a “mouthful of air”. We are reminded of language's potential as imitative music every time we look for the origins of a word like “splash” or “gurgle” in a dictionary and find the indication onomatopeia.
And, if you happen to subscribe to my theory, you’ll see that Nat King Cole – that model of urbane sophistication – only had to sneeze, in the company of a French-, Spanish-, Italian-, German- or English-speaker, to be transported back to the most ancient roots of oral (and nasal) communication...
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