don’t touch my eggs: cheers

by Schuyler Hedstrom

As a Business English teacher in Madrid I have a lot of free time between classes that I usually fill with reading The New Yorker, learning lines for a play, or eating. I’m one of those people who thinks it’s healthier to eat a lot of small meals throughout the day so I spend a fair amount of time eating in public places — a thing that Spaniards never do. In the U.S. it’s not uncommon to get your coffee or your lunch to go. You eat a bagel while walking to work or a sandwich at your desk. In Spain, meals are more sacred and should be treated as such. Since I spend a lot of time snacking during the day, I’ve discovered a curious Spanish expression that seems to come involuntarily from everyone around me: “Buen provecho.” Translated into English, it would be: “Enjoy your meal” or in French: “Bon Appetit.” This expression isn’t unheard of in the U.S. but its frequency in Spain is amazing. I think in a typical day I hear it no less than 15 times. I sometimes think that my students deliberately leave their desks and come over to me to make sure that I’m “enjoying my meal.”

Because I hear this expression so frequently and I have so much free time to ponder expressions such as this one, this month’s article is about socially obligated responses and superstitions. One of the most popular and ubiquitous in all languages is the post-sneeze “God bless you.” I’ve personally taken the “God” out of “God bless you” both for brevity and to better represent my somewhat secular agnostic view of the world, but I still feel compelled to say something when someone sneezes. In Spanish the expression is slightly different — they say “Jesus” or “Salud” (“Health”) — but the sense of obligation is the same. I did a bit of research and found that there are various theories of the origin of this expression. My favorites include: a blessing to halt the spread of the plague, a blessing to keep the devil out of your soul, and an acknowledgment of good luck that will soon come to you. There’re also the urban legends that your heart stops briefly when you sneeze or that if you sneeze with your eyes open they’ll pop out of you head. Maybe “Bless you” is a form of congratulations that neither of those things happened.

Another socially obligated response is to toast — to clink your glasses together and say “cheers” — when you drink. In recent years this has been combined with the superstition that if you don’t look directly in the other person’s eye when you say “cheers” you will be punished with seven years of bad sex or five years of bad love or 25 years of bad acne; I don’t know, insert scary prediction here. This superstition/tradition also has its myriad, somewhat unproven origins, ranging from warding off evil spirits, wishing for good luck, and my personal favorite: testing for poison by sloshing and therefore mixing the contents of the glasses as they clink together. The expression “cheers” comes from “chere” meaning good humor in Old English and was a salutation before drinking. “Cheers” in Spanish is “salud” (which is the same way that Spaniards say, “God bless you” …hmm)

I don’t profess to be a French linguist but I was at a dinner party a few years ago when suddenly without warning, an awkward silence fell over the crowd and my French friend said: “Un ange passé” meaning “An angel is passing over.” Apparently, a French superstition tells that when a group of people stop speaking without an apparent reason, an angel has just passed through the room. Whether the angel was the cause of the silence or the result of it remains unclear.

Getting back to my experiences in Madrid, there are two other involuntary Spanish responses that never cease to throw me for a loop. The first is saying “Hasta luego” when you leave an elevator. In the U.S., we are taught not to talk to strangers and so I always feel slightly uncomfortable when I share an elevator with someone and we don’t say anything until at the end he says: “See you later.” My reaction is like: “Oh, Hi! I didn’t see you there!” or “Why are you talking to me?” The other situation that is hard for me to adapt to is when Spaniards pass an acquaintance in the street or in the hall and instead of just saying “Hi” or “What’s up?” as they walk past, they say “Hasta luego.” My question is: how can you say goodbye to someone when you haven’t even said hello yet? I always say “Hola” as they say “Hasta luego.” Then I feel embarrassed and make a mental note to stop doing that. Then five minutes later it happens again. It’s difficult to begin an interaction with “Hasta luego.” For me it’s more of an ending. Like now. Hasta luego.

tagged under:america, europe, language, living abroad, religion, spain