10 Everyday Habits With Totally Interesting Origins

Every day is different. Except all the bits that aren’t.

No matter what you have in the diary, there are plenty of things that you likely do every single day. You get up, drink coffee, eat breakfast, take a shower, and brush your teeth. If you have the day off, you might go out exercising or read a book. If you’re at work, you might commute and greet and talk to workmates. You’ll eat lunch and an evening meal. All told, there’s a lot in our everyday lives that happens—well, every day. So, where did all of these subconscious routine practices come from?

1. Bathing
2. Drinking Coffee
3. Brushing Your Teeth
4. Eating at Regular Times
5. Shaking Hands
6. Saying “Hello”
7. Saying “Bless You” When Someone Sneezes
8. Reading Silently
9. Running for Fitness
10. Sleeping in Separate Rooms

Bathing

There’s something of an unpleasant historical rumor that claims that everyone in the past was fairly lackadaisical when it came to matters of personal hygiene (and as a result probably smelled pretty funky). Even Elizabeth I’s alleged boast that she took a bath once a month “whether she needed it or no” sounds fairly grim compared to modern standards—but her monthly ablutions were nothing compared to Isabella of Castille, who claimed only to have bathed twice in her life: on the day she was born, and on the day of her marriage.

The idea that our daily personal hygiene routine is a modern invention is just as vicious a rumor, though. People might not have been taking daily baths or showers with scented soaps and shampoos in medieval times (not least because it was once believed that doing so regularly was harmful and risked opening the body up to potential infection), but even ordinary folk have long understood the importance of washing for reasons of hygiene.

The Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, or “Salernitan Rule of Health,” was a vast Latin guide to matters of cleanliness written at a renowned medical school in Salerno, Italy, sometime around the 11th century. It (among many other things) stressed the importance of at least washing the face and hands in cold water every morning, and as a result, it became something of a common practice in medieval times to keep a basin and pitcher of water ready for washing first thing in the morning. And as our indoor plumbing and access to hot running water improved over the centuries, our daily routine changed to take advantage of it.

Drinking Coffee

Over half of Americans drink coffee regularly, and a little over a third of people admit to drinking a cup of coffee in the morning as an energy-boosting pick-me-up. In the West, however, our love of coffee is only a few centuries old, with the very first coffee shops emerging in the mid-1600s. The drink itself—and its stimulating effects—have been known about for far longer than that.

Coffee is thought to be native to Ethiopia, where (according to legend) its stimulant effects were first noted in the 9th century by goatherds whose livestock would become restless whenever they ate the plants’ berries. It was in the Middle East, however, that coffee later began to be cultivated and prepared as a stimulating drink, with Sufi monks in Yemen known to use coffee as an aid to concentration, and to keep them awake during late evening devotions. As the consumption of coffee spread across the world from there, so too did the monks’ fondness for a quick, stimulating drink.

Brushing Your Teeth

Alongside those rumors of medieval people never bathing, it’s also something of a stereotype to assume they had awful, rotting, yellow teeth. Yet that’s not true either, as there is considerable evidence to show that people have been taking care of their teeth for many thousands of years.

The Ancient Egyptians used simple tools like frayed twigs to clean their teeth, and similar practices are recorded in other ancient civilizations. That being said, however, teeth-brushing wasn’t a daily practice, but rather employed whenever required. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that a hugely persuasive dental hygiene campaign was launched by the early toothpaste brand Pepsodent that began prompting people to brush their teeth at least once a day, and established the habit we still follow today.

Eating at Regular Times

The idea of eating three square meals a day is something we shared with the Romans, who typically ate a light breakfast, or “ientaculum,” at dawn, followed by a larger lunch, or “cena,” (the largest meal of the Roman day) around midday or early afternoon, and a light supper, or “vesperna,” in the evening. (Some Romans also took a light pre-cena lunch, or “prandium,” in the later morning.)

This setup likely became established in antiquity due to our reliance on daylight: people would have risen at dawn to make the most of the daylight hours, stopping at midday to satisfy their hunger, and then downed tools after a few more hours’ work as soon as it became dark. Over time, however, the size and timing of these three meals changed thanks to a curious combination of religion, employment, and technology.

Christians were expected to fast before Mass, and so the first meal of the day became known as “breakfast” as it broke the fast of the previous day, and would typically have been eaten after morning services. As the world industrialized and our work life began to change, having our largest and most filling meal in the middle of the day understandably became less viable—but as artificial light (and later electricity) made people less reliant on daylight, people could afford to be more flexible with their time, and consequently lunch became a smaller and faster affair, while the largest meal of the day drifted into evening.

Shaking Hands

We’ve been shaking hands as a sign of agreement, reconciliation, goodwill, deal-making, or just as a simple greeting for thousands of years.

According to popular history, this gesture first emerged in antiquity, when a sword or a similar weapon would have been kept on a (right-handed) person’s left side, so that they could draw it with their dominant hand whenever needed. Clasping somebody else’s right hand ultimately became a way of signaling that you had no intention of drawing your sword, and were therefore in agreement, happy to accept terms, or, more generally, just happy to see or meet someone.

Shaking their hand, moreover, might have been a way of double-checking that they had nothing hidden up their sleeve (or else of proving that you had nothing up yours).

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Saying “Hello”

We might use it as a simple greeting today, but until as recently as the late 1800s, the word “hello”—or “hallo,” “hullo”, “hollo,” or any one of a multiplicity of old variations of it—was more commonly used as an expression of surprise. Although the origins of all these words are notoriously murky, it’s thought that they might be connected to even older and simpler expressions, such as “ho!” that have long been used to call attention to something.

Alternatively, “hello” might have been influenced by “hail” (as in “hail fellow well met,” not the icy precipitation), which has likewise long been used as a greeting, and is a distant relative of “health.”

Whatever its ultimate etymology, the use of hello as a greeting rather than to communicate surprise was accelerated by the invention of the telephone in the late 1800s. Famously, it was Thomas Edison who advocated “hello” as the preferred word to answer a telephone call from an unknown caller; had Alexander Graham Bell gotten his way, we’d all be saying “ahoy.”

Saying “Bless You” When Someone Sneezes

There’s nothing we can do about sneezing, of course, which is an entirely involuntary act that helps clear out our nasal passages. We can control our response to a sneeze, of course—which, more often than not, is to say, “Bless you.”

Although there are rival explanations for this particular quirk, all are thought to go back to more superstitious times, when people were fearful of death, the devil, or disease. One theory claims the habit emerged during the Black Death, when blessing someone who had sneezed acted as a brief prayer, hoping that they would not become ill.

Alternative theories, however, suggest that people once believed that sneezing either caused a person’s soul to briefly leave their body, or else was their body’s attempt to rid itself of the influence of the devil; blessing them, therefore, became a means of ensuring their soul remained safely attached.

Reading Silently

Humans have been able to read for as long as we’ve been able to write, of course, which puts this process somewhere around the 6,000-year-old mark. However, one thing that we do without thinking with the written word today was seemingly once considered a little out of the ordinary: most of us read in complete silence.

Unless you particularly want to (or are asked to) read aloud, reading is usually a silent affair. Not so for much of recorded history, it seems, as when St. Augustine paid a visit to Bishop Ambrose of Milan in the 4th century, he was so shocked to find him reading in silence that Augustine thought the sight worthy of note in his Confessions, written around 397 CE. “When he read,” Augustine wrote of Ambrose, “his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent, and his tongue was still.”

This, some historians have argued, suggests that reading was at this time considered a spoken act, not a private one.

In fact, there are a handful of even earlier stories of people similarly being stunned by silent reading (including a tale in Plutarch of Alexander the Great reading a letter from his mother, much to the amazement of his soldiers) that likewise suggest reading was for a long time considered a social act. Things only began to change as society changed, swapping out quiet evenings reading stories to one another for more modern entertainments.

Running for Fitness

Going for a run is now so commonplace that these days it’s rare not to see someone out pounding the pavement whenever you’re outside. This was so true in the mid-1960s, though, when jogging was considered so unusual that even a fitness-obsessed US senator, Strom Thurmond, found himself approached by the police while out on a run.

Running has always been part of the human experience, of course, and running contests are as old as the Ancient Greek Olympics and the Egyptian pharaohs’ Heb-Sed fitness test. But for a long time, that’s all running was: something we did when required, either by circumstance, or as a professional athlete testing or training their fitness.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the benefits of jogging were first advocated to the general public, with what is thought to be the world’s first jogging club founded by New Zealand sportsman Arthur Lydiard in Auckland in 1961. A chance meeting between Lydiard and American sports coach (and co-founder of Nike) Bill Bowerman the following year led to Bowerman co-writing an introductory guidebook with cardiologist WE Harris in 1966; that book sold a million copies, and jogging quickly became the fitness craze it has remained ever since.

Sleeping in Separate Rooms

When it’s time for bed, today most of us will retire to our own beds in our own bedrooms, either on our own or with no one else except our significant other (or perhaps a cat or a dog) to keep us company. Not so in the past, however—and not so until as relatively recently as the 19th century, before which so-called “communal sleep” with anyone from friends and relatives to coworkers and even complete strangers who simply happened to be booked into the same lodging house was the norm.

From a historical perspective, in fact, our preference for sleeping alone today would be considered fairly bizarre.

Communal sleeping had its fair share of benefits, of course. Before the days of radiators and central heating systems, sharing a bed with other people was a cheap and easy way of keeping warm. In many houses, moreover, space was something of a premium—and a good quality bed was a bulky and expensive item of furniture—and so sharing a bed with others made practical and economic sense, too.

Even among the highest of high society, bed-sharing was commonplace, and even seen as a way of cementing relationships: Richard I and Philip II of France became so close that “at night the bed did not separate them.”

Things started to change in the 1800s, however, when a combination of factors led to communal sleeping falling out of fashion. Besides the obvious security issues involved in sharing not just a bedroom but a bed with a complete stranger when traveling on the road, there were also issues of hygiene and sanitation, and disease could easily be spread in such close quarters.

As people became wealthier, houses became larger, and furniture became more affordable, the other factors necessitating shared beds likewise began to decline, and we’ve been sleeping alone (most of the time, at least) ever since.