Many friendships at our coffee shop start with an orgasm — multiple orgasms to be precise.
Although the stranger on the stool next to you has invaded your personal space and put you at risk by spreading germs, you answer her sneeze with a blessing. We’ve being doing that since the invention of dust.
We’ve been blessing each other since the invention of dust.
Minute particles breach our nasal passages, setting off a tickling response. We lose control and blast out a spray to expel them. The soft palate and palatine uvula push down and the back of the tongue lifts to partly close the mouth. Most of our sneeze escapes out through the nose — some of it through the mouth. Sadly, many Americans take their palatine uvulas for granted.
There are many superstitions about sneezing. It’s as a close as you can get to death is one of them. In parts of Asia a sneeze means someone’s gossiping about you. Health care professionals believe that using “The Elbow Sneeze” combats the spread of germs. Why not just wipe your nose on your sleeve?
Once you say “God bless you,” “Salud,” “Jesus,” “Gesundheit,” or “Chiranjeeva sataish” to a stranger, the ice has been broken. The next day you ask to reach past that person’s knees to get your power adapter. You’re talking to each other and before you know it you discover you have an amazing number of things in common — loose bowels, a throbbing headache, inflamed joints, chills and a fever of 101º being among them.
NOTE about this historic :03 second film clip: In 1884 Edison factory worker Fred Ott was captured on film. There is no record of Fred’s second or third sneeze.
