I like to think about obscure things, and lately, I’ve been thinking about memes.  You know, those selfish ideas that replicate through the collective human psyche like mental parasites.  Okay, perhaps you don’t know—I did say obscure.  The term “meme” was coined by the prominent British biologist, Richard Dawkins, who gained notoriety by calling genes selfish and God a delusion.  However you swing on the teleology of molecules or the certainty of ultimate causation, you will, I trust, find that Dawkins’ christening of the meme has fertilized our ideas about ideas.

 Memes are thoughts, sayings, stories, jokes, jingles, etc. that get passed along or inherited much like genes, only through social, rather than biological, heredity. Like DNA they are subject to change and selection, and they can also enjoy great success, sometimes for reasons that defy simple explanation.  Take, for example, the saying “nothing to sneeze at.”  Nobody knows exactly when this idiomatic quip originated, or even what the allusion to a sneeze connotes.  The saying means “not trivial,” as when someone says “an extra thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at.”  The implication is that sneezing at something is trivial, a notion that runs contrary to another sneezy saying, that trusty “Bless you,” or “God bless you” that follows Old Faithful in social settings.

As memes go, the act of blessing others or wishing them health after they sneeze is top flight, certainly more prominent than Father Christmas, and perhaps as widespread as the belief in an Almighty.  Indeed, it has so many cultural and linguistic parallels that there must be a real imperative behind it.

Wikipedia hosts a nice article on this nearly universal custom, including a long, but incomplete, list of linguistic equivalents to the predominantly European and American “bless you.”  The uncertain history includes the claim that “God bless you” originated with Pope Gregory I, whose papacy began in 590 AD as a wave of bubonic plague was threatening Rome.  In addition to obligate prayer, as the story goes, the wise pope urged his subjects to exclaim “God bless you” when someone sneezed, as sneezing was thought to portend the onset of plague.

While this legend may hold some truth in the origin of one benediction, it is almost certainly just one step in the long evolutionary transmutation of a meme.  Other more nebulous legends hold that blessings ward off evil spirits that opportunistically enter a body at the vulnerable moment when all of ones breath (life force) has been momentarily expired, or that the explosive exhalation blasts out the soul and a quick blessing reseats it. 

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Bless your heart
written by sxe60, October 19, 2008

• Blessing people brings to mind a swarmy local Dallas guy name Bob Lovell who pitches Home Marketing Services on TV. His catch word phrase is "Bless your heart". He even uses it as his web page address www.blessyourheart.com. Now I can see, since the heart is a vital organ, that it may need blessing from time to time. But, why not bless your brain or bless your liver too?

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RE: Bless your heart
written by rsr, October 19, 2008

Good point, but why bless any organ? What does it mean to bless something? Do we really have the power to manifest an outcome by uttering a blessing? I think that the presumption is that blessing things is like issuing a short prayer, and in doing so we tap into God's power to affect outcomes. This practice seems to presume that God is in the habit of taking suggestions from us on when to intervene. I find it doubtful that an all powerful deity would bother with most things that we see fit to bless, but then I find many rational inconsistencies in just about any other iron age belief.

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RE: Bless your heart
written by sxe60, October 19, 2008

True, but pneumonic respiratory problems, such as sneezing, are symptoms of the plague. Consequently, they must have deduced that sneezing on someone and the fact that they later died had some connection.

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RE: Bless your heart
written by rsr, October 19, 2008

Thing is, nobody had any clue about germs or disease transmission in 590 AD.

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RE: Bless your heart
written by sxe60, October 19, 2008

I can see how this phrase could be connected to the plague. If sneezing was thought to be an indication of the disease, it would follow that you didn't want to sneeze on anyone or anything dear to you lest they catch it and die. Thus, something or someone of value to you is nothing to sneeze at and if you do sneeze on them then they can only be saved by God's blessing.

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