It does seem to be a rather strange thing to say when someone sneezes making weird ugly faces and expelling mucus! But the origin of the tradition of saying ‘God bless you’ is not entirely clear. one mistaken belief states that the soul might escape the body when one sneezes. So saying ‘God bless you’ wards off Satan when the soul is temporarily vulnerable. Another story says that the heart stops when we sneeze. Therefore saying ‘God bless you’ set the ‘ol’ ‘ticker’ in motion. The most popular belief comes from the middle ages though! In the early 1330s, there was an outbreak of a ‘bubonic plague’that occurred in China. It mainly affected the rodents, but the fleas transmitted the disease in people also. Since China that time was one of the busiest of world’s trading nations, the plague spread to Western Asia and Europe very rapidly. After a period of just 5 years, 25 million people were dead. This was called ‘The Black Death’. So a sneeze was an indication of the impending death. Saying the phrase was hence a way to say ‘May God take care of you’. Today, however, saying this phrase his more a sign of good manners rather than a shield to protect against death or Satan.
LEARNING BUG 