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Comment by buildingsramen | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this is intellectualizing something that isn't that deep. It's a word you say, not think about. Why do English speakers say "excuse me" after a sneeze? The answer is apocryphal and uninteresting.

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Haha, I think it's more like an article about "Goodbye" originating from "God be with ye". That part is interesting - a curiosity. However, I do wish there was more about the history of the term, especially that it's a 20th Century national formalization of meal ceremony that was one of many practices of the time. It seems that one particular school of Buddhism won this memetic war and the structures of formalization took it on and thereafter it is now Japanese Culture with a capital C.

The closest analogue I can think of is diamond engagement rings. Doubtless they were given out prior, but they became formally 'normal' for a while. Of course, one was orchestrated and the other was perhaps just the effect of picking some formal culture to teach and so on. But it is similar in recency of popularity.

now _that_ would be more interesting, but it would also be a completely different article

You can make anything shallow by just not thinking about it.

Conversely, the way things become deep is because we intellectualize them.

Sure but while studying the etymology of words can do a lot to help you understand them (particularly from a linguistic perspective), its really more important to consider what people mean when they use a word, not where it came from. "Howdy" comes from "How do you do?" and yet nobody treats "Howdy" as a question. If I say "Howdy" to you (which is something I do often), and you answer "Good, how are you," I'm going to give you a weird look.

Actually, funnily enough. I grew up in Texas and customarily say "howdy" as a greeting, and I grew up using it just as you say. I found it confusing for a while that coworkers who weren't native English speakers, particularly those I hadn't met in person, would reply to my Slack "howdy" with something like "oh, I'm good, thanks for asking". It was very jarring, like I said "hello" and they said "banana"; took me longer than it should have to figure out they were parsing the full "how do you do" since I'd never encountered that growing up. It became a pretty common experience at work.

Sure, sure; an unexamined life is not worth living, yadda yadda

I just take issue with this type of analysis for trying to generate that depth - as an etymological lesson, it's minimally interesting, but as far as it tries to "say something" about Japanese culture, it can't.

Similar to a lot of other Japanese phrases out there - "ikigai", etc. It's quite uninteresting as someone who's Japanese or lived in Japan, but an extra level of meaning is attached when projected outwards

Probably has something to do with the fact that the blog post is not human-written.

Where I’m from, the person who sneezes often says nothing, unless they’re accidentally sneezing near someone else. Strangers nearby however will say “bless you!” or occasionally “gesundheit!” But yes, I think people who utter the words do so as a quick reaction without much forethought.

It is nice to acknowledge someone’s or something’s existence/work/troubles/etc. through words. Think about all the gratefulness stuff that circulated around the western media in late 2010s.

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