God bless you

God bless you (variants include God bless or bless you) is a common English expression, used to wish a person blessings in various situations, especially as a response to a sneeze, and also, when parting or writing a valediction.

The phrase has been used in the Hebrew Bible by Jews (cf. Numbers 6:24), and by Christians, since the time of the early Church as a benediction, as well as a means of bidding a person Godspeed. Many clergy, when blessing their congregants individually or corporately, use the phrase "God bless you".

National Geographic reports that during the plague of AD 590, "Pope Gregory I ordered unceasing prayer for divine intercession. Part of his command was that anyone sneezing be blessed immediately ("God bless you"), since sneezing was often the first sign that someone was falling ill with the plague." By AD 750, it became customary to say "God bless you" as a response to one sneezing.

Origins and legends

The practice of blessing someone who sneezes, dating as far back as at least AD 77, however is far older than most specific explanations can account for. Some have offered an explanation suggesting that people once held the folk belief that a person's soul could be thrown from their body when they sneezed, that sneezing otherwise opened the body to invasion by the Devil or evil spirits, or that sneezing was the body's effort to force out an invading evil presence. In these cases, "God bless you" or "bless you" is used as a sort of shield against evil. The Irish Folk story "Master and Man" by Thomas Crofton Croker, collected by William Butler Yeats, describes this variation. Moreover, in the past some people may have thought that the heart stops beating during a sneeze, and that the phrase "God bless you" encourages the heart to continue beating.

Bless

Bless may refer to:

See also

Nicky Astria

Nastiti Karja Dewi (born 18 October 1967), better known by her stage name Nicky Astria, is an Indonesian musician.

Born in Bandung, West Java, to a schoolteacher and his musician wife, Astria began singing in 1975 while the family was stationed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. After several years of participating in festivals and taking vocal training, in 1984 Astria was signed to AMK Records. Although her first album flopped, she found success with her second and third albums, Jarum Neraka and Tangan-Tangan Setan.

Bruce Emond of The Jakarta Post described her as "one of the biggest [Indonesian] music stars of the late 1980s", while guitarist-cum-songwriter Ian Antono called her "the best female pop rock singer Indonesia has ever seen". Two of her songs, "Jarum Neraka" and "Tangan-Tangan Setan" (both 1985), were listed as among the best Indonesian songs of all time by Rolling Stone Indonesia in 2009

Biography

Early life and career

Dewi was born on 18 October 1967 in Bandung to Tatang Kosasih Wirahadimaja, a schoolteacher, and Andrina Heryati, a traditional musician; she was the couple's only daughter, and fourth of five children. Dewi was known as a tomboy in her youth and is of Sundanese descent. In 1972, her father was sent to head the Indonesian school at the Indonesian embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Dewi, although of the age to begin kindergarten, was enrolled in the first grade. She reportedly had trouble initially, as her family spoke Sundanese at home, and thus she had difficulty understanding the Indonesian-language lessons.