8 Everyday Customs and Where They Really Come From

You’ve probably been told the clink was about safety: knock the cups together hard enough and some wine would slosh from one to the other, proving nobody had poisoned the drinks. It’s a great story. It’s also almost certainly a myth — historians can’t find any real evidence for it, and if you were genuinely worried about poison, a splash of wine wouldn’t reassure you much.

The likelier explanation is simpler and older. Toasting to health and to the gods goes back to antiquity, and the clink most plausibly grew out of that ritual — a way of drawing everyone into a single shared moment, and, some have suggested, of adding sound to a pleasure that otherwise only touched sight, smell, and taste.

The candles-on-a-cake tradition is often traced to 18th-century Germany, where a children’s birthday celebration called Kinderfeste reportedly featured a cake ringed with candles — one for each year, sometimes plus one for the year ahead — kept lit and replaced all day until the cake was eaten in the evening.

The idea that the smoke, or your wish, floats up to the heavens is sometimes linked back to the ancient Greeks, who may have offered candle-lit cakes to the moon goddess Artemis. Honest caveat: the through-line from Greek temples to your kitchen is thin and hard to document. What’s clear is that the modern version — one big wish, one big breath — is a relatively recent, and largely American, flourish.

The popular theory is that a handshake showed you weren’t holding a weapon, and the up-and-down pump was meant to shake loose any blade hidden up a sleeve. There’s an ancient pedigree for the gesture — a ninth-century-BC Assyrian relief shows two rulers clasping hands, and Greek funerary art is full of handshakes — but the “checking for weapons” motive is a modern guess, not something the old sources actually tell us.

What we can say is that clasping hands has signified good faith, agreement, and equal footing for thousands of years. The everyday business handshake you know best is much younger — often credited to Quakers in the 17th and 18th centuries, who preferred an egalitarian handshake to bowing and tipping hats.

Why the fourth finger of the left hand? The romantic answer, handed down since antiquity, is the vena amoris — the “vein of love” — a vein believed to run directly from that finger to the heart. The Romans and others took the idea seriously enough to build a custom around it.

Here’s the honest part: anatomically, there’s no special vein. Every finger has more or less the same plumbing. The tradition stuck anyway, because a lovely idea outlives a wrong one — and even today which hand you use varies by country, so the “rule” was never as fixed as it feels.

The story you hear most often is that Pope Gregory I began telling people to say “God bless you” to sneezers during a deadly plague in sixth-century Rome, since a sneeze could be the first sign you were about to die. It’s a widely repeated origin — and a genuinely uncertain one, more tradition than documented fact.

Older, more folkloric explanations run alongside it: that a sneeze briefly let the soul escape the body, or let evil spirits in, and a blessing sealed the gap. What’s certain is that blessing a sneeze is remarkably widespread across cultures and languages — the impulse to say something when someone sneezes seems close to universal.

Tipping most likely grew out of the patron-and-servant world of late-medieval and early-modern Europe, where a master might hand a bit of extra money to a servant for good service or to a visitor’s staff. By the 17th century, coffeehouses and taverns in England had the custom well underway.

You may have heard “tip” is an acronym for “to insure promptness.” Don’t repeat it — that’s a folk etymology invented long after the fact. Interestingly, tipping came to the United States from Europe in the 1800s and was, for a time, resented as undemocratic, before it became the deeply entrenched American institution it is now.

White wasn’t always the default. For most of history brides simply wore their best dress, in whatever color they had. The white gown became fashionable after Queen Victoria wore white lace to marry Prince Albert in 1840, and the wealthy — then everyone — followed the royal lead.

The idea that white had always symbolized purity is a bit of after-the-fact storytelling; the color’s meaning got attached once the fashion caught on. Before Victoria, a white dress mostly signaled that you were rich enough to wear something you couldn’t easily clean and might never wear again.

Say something hopeful out loud — “the car’s never broken down on me” — and you’ll probably reach for the nearest table before you’ve even finished. The habit is usually traced to old European folk beliefs about spirits living in trees: you knocked on the wood to call on their protection, or to keep them from overhearing your good fortune and spoiling it.

As with a lot of superstition, the trail is fuzzy — some scholars point instead to a 19th-century British children’s chasing game called “Tiggy Touchwood,” where touching wood made you safe. Either way, the reflex has long outlived any belief in tree spirits. Most of us knock while insisting we don’t believe in it, which is somehow the most human part of the whole thing.