Bless Who?

There's a new guy at work who sits in the cube next to mine. The few times he's sneezed, I've said the customary "bless you," but he has always responded with silence.

I imagine his silence arises from feelings similar to those some people have when they hear "under God" in the pledge, or see "in God we trust" on all of our money (so much for rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's), or are forced to participate in school prayer, or have to view in a courthouse a hulking monument engraved with the ten commandments, only three or four of which can be related to our legal system.

And I can definitely sympathize with this feeling, as "bless you" is a religious phrase, once you think about who's doing the blessing—the full subjunctive form is, after all, "may God bless you."

But when I say it, and I think most other non-religious people would feel the same, I don't say it with religion, I don't feel anything religious. It's simply the one after-sneeze expression we have in English. The German "gesundheit" is available, but it always has a facetious ring to it, and what if you want to be truly earnest, say, after a particularly furniture-rattling sneeze?

If only we could say, "health!" like they do in nearly every other European language, for that is truly what any post-sternutation wishes or concerns should be directed towards. Why associate religion with the high-force expulsion of spit and snot?

Of course, "bless you" supposedly arose from a belief that the soul might leave the body, or that the devil might enter, during a sneeze. Other accounts say it started with Pope Gregory the Great during one of the many historical outbreaks of the bubonic plague, one symptom of which, unsurprisingly, was sneezing.

And before modern medicine, a sneeze could have been considered an omen of greater illness, bubonic plague or no—but still, why not say "health"? "Bless you" seems more morbid, as if you know the person's going to die. It's like you've given up hope, and you think the other person's going to give up the ghost, so you resign yourself to saying, "I hope God blesses you," and perhaps that person won't tumble down to God's eternal torture chamber. (Maybe it really was from those bubonic times, when death was pretty much inevitable.)

"Health!" I'd rather say. "Screw the afterlife, I want you well in this life." But we don't have that phrase available.

So now I've taken to not saying anything at all when someone sneezes. But it feels very odd greeting a sneeze with silence—it feels rude. And I'm sure that my other coworkers, to whom I've always extended a "bless you," have noticed that now I say nothing. Do they wonder why I've suddenly become impolite?

Yet if I continue saying it when it's not desired, that makes me seem somewhat like those obnoxious Christians who disobey their master's command not to "pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men" (Matthew 6:5), who blatantly advertise their religion and impose it on others. Far be it from me, non-Christian that I am, to make another non-Christian feel that way about me.

Short of finding a new phrase, only one other solution suggests itself to me. But would it be okay to say it to some, and not to others?

At any rate, "health!"should the English after-sneeze expression change to something less religious?