Blessings

[triskellian]

Someone in the finance department of the institution I work for always finishes his phone calls with 'bless you'. I just took a message from him for an officemate, and received his blessings along with his thanks, and thus was born a poll:

Poll Blessings

Comments

[undyingking]

I guess for me, blessage on sneezage is pretty much a reflex polite acknowledgement of their suffering... but maybe I should start making it mean something.

Follow-on question: do you say thank you when someone blesses you after sneezing? And if so, what do you feel you're thainking them for?

[triskellian]

I do say 'thank you' and I don't feel that I'm really thanking them for anything, any more than I'm genuinely blessing them if I say 'bless you'. It's just a standard call and response thingie. But now that I'm examining it, I am trying to stop saying 'thank you' as well as 'bless you' and I am reassuring myself that since that 'thank you' is often claimed to be bad luck, it's not impolite to omit it.

(Intersections and contradictions of superstitions and politenesses are probably beyond the scope of this comment ;-)

[undyingking]

often claimed to be bad luck

Ooh, I hadn't heard that. I wonder if thanking for other kinds of blessing is similarly ill-fortuned.

[triskellian]

It allegedly kills a fairy, too. Unless you clap your hands and/or say 'I believe in fairies'.

[undyingking]

Ooh, great, I'm up for that in a big way.