What’s the big deal with spitting?
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Version 0 of 1. Blowing your nose in public is indecent, according to the treatise on manners written in the early 16th century by Giovanni della Casa, the archbishop of Benevento. Even worse, he wrote, was “when you have blown your nose, to draw aside and examine the contents of your handkerchief; as if you expected pearls and rubies to distil from your brain”. He didn’t like coughing or spitting, “expectorating, as it were”, and thought them equally unacceptable. The archbishop was fighting an uphill battle: spitting in public remained acceptable in the United States and Europe for the next few centuries. Saloon bars in North America, frequented by tobacco-chewing customers, eventually began installing spittoons; vessels to spit into. “If you expect to rate as a gentleman,” went one slogan, “don’t expectorate on the floor.” Or into a fellow footballer’s face, as Manchester United’s Jonny Evans and Newcastle United’s Papiss Cissé are accused of doing during a Premier League match last night. Related: Enfield's ban on spitting - the antisocial habit 'everyone' hates New Football Association guidelines dictate a six-match ban for spitting at an opponent “or at any other person”, as well as immediate send-off. The FA has company: in 2013 the London borough of Enfield became the first local authority to have a bylaw on spitting. People can spit into a handkerchief, tissue, bin, spittoon or other receptacle without being prosecuted. Open-street spitting, though, can bring prosecution and fines of up to £500. What’s the big deal with gobbing? Outside epidemic zones, spitting is unlikely to transmit any serious disease (there’s a slightly higher risk in areas with prevalent tuberculosis). But compared with other bodily emissions, it’s almost benign. Just one gram of excrement can carry 10m viruses, 1m bacteria, a thousand parasite cysts and 100 worm eggs. At least 50 communicable diseases like to travel in shit. That’s why we find excrement disgusting: because it’s dangerous. Experts on disgust distinguish between cultural aversions and biological ones. Cultural aversions can change according to time, geography and convention. Biological ones – “healthy squeamishness”, in the words of noted “disgustologist” Dr Val Curtis – shouldn’t. Excrement repels us – by sight, and by its stinky compound skatole – because it’s supposed to. It’s why we find putrid things gross, and why a hair attached to a head is less disgusting than a stray one in our soup (because hair can carry disease), or why earthworms repel us when they don’t endanger us (because they remind us of parasitic worms, which do). Travel to anywhere in China and you will probably be confronted by spitting, coughing and emissions of all sorts out of noses and mouths. You may find it as disgusting as the archbishop of Benevento did, but that’s just opinion. Standards of personal hygiene that seem immutable and ancient can be punctured by travel. It’s considered deeply impolite to blow your nose in public in Japan, for example. And don’t get me started on toilet paper: the half of the world’s population that washes their backsides after defecating – very sensibly – thinks us toilet-paper users to be frankly filthy. I always check behind me before I clamp a nostril and let loose with the other Things that seem absolute standards of acceptable behaviour can seem extraordinary to others: like having a toothbrush in a glass in a bathroom, and flushing the toilet with the seat up (two words: spray travels). And social convention can change according to circumstance: the wonderful anthropologist Alexander Kira, in her book The Bathroom, had a scale of how acceptable a warm toilet seat is depending on where you are and who has used it: a warm seat in a family bathroom is much more socially acceptable than one in a public toilet. We runners and fell-runners get away with spitting and the acquired skill of the single nose-blow, when we would never dream of doing such things in the street. Of course, I always check behind me before I clamp a nostril and let loose with the other: it’s only polite. Blowing my nose into a handkerchief and gazing at it though? That’s disgusting. |