Ever wondered why we use the phrase ‘God bless you’ when someone sneezes?
There are certain things that become a part of our lives without us knowing the reason why. Saying ‘God bless you’ after someone sneezes has to be on the top of that list. It’s a rarity to let a sneeze shoot out without someone uttering the words, and quite often you won’t even know the person who says it.
It is definitely considered polite to say it but there are a couple of reasons that explain why this phrase became a tradition.
- Apparently in olden days some people thought you ran the risk of sneezing out your soul whenever an attack happened, so saying “bless you” offered some protection.
- There was also a line of thought that the devil could steal someone’s soul when they sneezed.
- In the era when plague was quite prominent, one of the symptoms of the disease was sneezing, Pope Gregory I suggested at that time that saying ‘Bless you’after a person sneezed would be a way to pray that the disease doesn’t spread to the person or the ones around him.
- It is also believed that this phrase originated from superstition.
The whole idea behind this phrase was to believe that a person was healthy and did not catch any illness. The tradition has continued over the years and is now a polite way of excusing someone who sneezes.
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