9 Everyday Habits With Surprisingly Old Origins

The story you’ve probably heard goes like this: in the year 590, as plague swept through Rome, Pope Gregory I told people to answer every sneeze with “God bless you,” because a sneeze might be the first sign that someone was falling ill. It’s a vivid tale, and it’s the version almost everyone knows.

Here’s the honest part: historians treat the Pope Gregory story as tradition rather than documented fact. The custom is older and messier than one papal decree. Long before Rome, people across the ancient world worried that a sneeze could briefly loosen the soul from the body, and a quick blessing was insurance. So you’re not really invoking a sixth-century pope when you say it — you’re echoing a much older human nervousness about what a sneeze might mean.

This one is genuinely ancient, and we can point to the proof. One of the earliest known images of a handshake is carved into a stone relief from the ninth century BC, showing the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III clasping the hand of the Babylonian king Marduk-zakir-shumi I to seal an alliance between them. Two kings, one grip, a deal made — nearly three thousand years ago.

By the fifth century BC the Greeks had a word for it, dexiosis, and you can still see it on their funerary carvings: two people joining hands in farewell. The old idea is that an open right hand shows you’re carrying no weapon, a gesture of peace. Historians are careful to say that bit is likely rather than proven. But next time you shake on something, know you’re repeating a motion that kings used to end wars.

Why the right hand, specifically? The usual explanation is simple and a little chilling: most people are right-handed, so the right was the hand that held the sword or dagger. Offering it, empty and open, was a way of saying look, I mean you no harm. Some versions of the story even claim the up-and-down pumping motion was meant to shake loose any blade hidden up a sleeve.

Scholars will tell you the weapon-hand theory is plausible but short on hard evidence — nobody wrote down “here is why we use the right hand” at the time. What’s clearer is that the right hand has carried meanings of trust, honor, and good faith across many cultures for a very long time. The Greek word for the gesture, dexiosis, comes straight from dexios, meaning “right hand.”

You’ve surely heard the dramatic version: in the suspicious old days, people clinked cups hard enough to slosh wine from one into the other, so that if your companion had poisoned your drink, he’d be forced to swallow some himself. Clink hard, trust secured. It’s a wonderful story to tell over dinner.

It’s also almost certainly not true. Fact-checkers and historians have traced the poison tale and found no real evidence behind it. The more believable explanation is gentler: drinking already pleases four of your senses — you see the wine, smell it, taste it, feel the glass — and the bright ring of glass on glass adds the fifth, sound. The clink simply makes the moment complete. Some also say the ring was once thought to chase off bad spirits. Either way, it’s about joy, not suspicion.

The word has drifted a long way. “Cheer” comes from the Old French chiere, which meant your face or your expression — your countenance. From there it slid toward “mood” or “state of mind,” and by around 1400 it had warmed into the sense we’d recognize: gladness, good spirits.

The habit of raising a glass and saying “cheers” is actually fairly recent, mostly a British custom of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as pub culture grew. So when you say it, you’re wishing someone a good face — a happy countenance — which is a rather sweet thing once you know it. Other languages went straight for health instead: the French santé, the Italian salute, the Spanish salud.

Tipping took shape in the coffeehouses and taverns of seventeenth-century England, where well-off patrons would drop a few coins to reward good service. The word “tip,” in the sense of handing someone a gratuity, shows up in English around 1706.

You may have been told that “tip” stands for “To Insure Promptitude,” supposedly printed on a bowl so you’d pay up front for faster service. Set that one down gently — it’s almost surely a myth. Acronyms barely existed as a way of making words before the twentieth century, and language scholars trace “tip” instead to old slang meaning simply to give or hand over. A neat story, but the plainer one is the true one.

This habit feels timeless, like it must have existed as long as coffee itself. It didn’t. The phrase “coffee break” was coined in 1952, when a trade group called the Pan-American Coffee Bureau ran a national ad campaign urging you to “Give yourself a Coffee-Break — and Get What Coffee Gives You.”

It worked spectacularly. Within a decade the coffee break had become a fixture of the American workday, even turning up in labor negotiations as a formal employee benefit. So that mid-morning pause you take with a mug in hand isn’t an ancient ritual at all — it’s a mid-century marketing idea that settled so deeply into daily life we forgot anyone had to sell it to us.

There’s a reason the ring goes where it does, and it’s a romantic one. People once believed a special vein, the vena amoris or “vein of love,” ran straight from the fourth finger of the left hand to the heart. Put the ring there, the thinking went, and it sat on a direct line to the one organ that mattered.

The belief is old — the phrase was written down by an English lawyer, Henry Swinburne, in a treatise published in 1686, and the idea echoes back through medieval and Roman writers before him. The trouble is that there’s no such vein. Every finger connects to the heart more or less the same way, as the physician William Harvey made plain in the seventeenth century when he worked out how blood actually circulates. The anatomy was wrong, but the gesture was too lovely to give up, so here we still are.

Today you cover a yawn out of plain good manners. But the habit started somewhere far stranger. Ancient Greeks and Romans worried that an open-mouthed yawn left you exposed — that your very soul might slip out, or that something unwelcome might slip in. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, noted people warding off the danger with a quick gesture as they yawned.

The superstition faded, but the covered mouth stayed, quietly changing jobs. By the Renaissance it had become a matter of etiquette rather than survival; an Italian bishop’s famous manners guide of 1558 scolded people for yawning openly in company. So the hand you raise to your mouth is doing polite duty now — but it started as a tiny act of self-defense against losing your soul.