One of the fellows in the office here loves to forward those "humorous" e-mails that circle the globe faster than the soon to be out of business Concorde. Now, very rarely they will be funny, such as the one with the picture of a duct taped duck, addressed to the Dept. of Homeland Security with the text "I am writing to you for further instructions as to what the next step is for me to take in protecting my family from possible attacks by terrorists. I have my duck taped....now what?" Now that was kinda cute.
But the one entitled "Sayings from the 1500s" - now, right away I expected to be disappointed. The e-mail started:
"Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married. Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children-last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it -- hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water".
They carried herbs because it was believed that the scent of the herbs would keep infectious diseases away. Yearly baths? In the 1500s? I'm dying to know when this belief started, probably at some Renaissance Fest and it just keeps getting repeated. There are plenty of extant recipes for making soap going back to Roman times. Hell, they washed their hunting dogs weekly, do you think they stayed stinky when their dogs were cleaner? Why the hell would people reuse bath water just because it's the 1500s? Do you think people were that lazy back then that they wouldn't go get fresh water?
What bugs me the most is that stupid, grossly inaccurate "isn't this funny" e-mails like this get passed around and people read it, think it's true and then go around the rest of their lives with giant misconceptions about what life was like in the 1500s without bothering to actually read a (well-researched) book. Even worse, people believe every e-mail, like the one about sodium laurel sulfate (the stuff they put in shampoo) being poisonous, or aspertame being a deadly killer. Pa-lease.
I used to try to fight this sort of thing, but do you really think it will make a difference if I send a reply to the sender saying, "I'm no professional historian, but these "facts" are bullshit"?
