Am I wrong in almost hating that saying, "have a blessed day".

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12. in practice i "take it in the spirit with which it was intended", but i'll draw a distinction between

"have a blessed day" and saying "god bless you" (or, usually, "g'bless you" or just "bless you&quot after you sneeze.

in the case of "god bless you", that's pretty much the standard, automatic, american response when someone sneezes. there are other, more regional sayings, the most amusing (to me) is "scat", which is meant to tell the devil not to enter your soul during your moment of weakness as you sneeze

i say "gesundheit", which is german for "to your health", but my mother was born in austria and that's the standard saying there. in spanish, one says "salud", which just means "health". point is, other languages don't feel the need to inject religion in that situation, but in america it's the standard response, to the point where many people don't even think of it as religious (even though it blatantly is).

in any event, i just usually take it as it was intended, as the automatic, standard polite thing to say when someone sneezes.


but there's a difference between that and "have a blessed day". here, there is an obvious and i'd say more standard saying, which is "have a nice day". you can even strengthen it if you like. "have a great/fantastic/wonderful/amazing day".

so unlike the sneezing situation, here "god bless you" is using an overtly religious statement when a secular one would be perfectly acceptable and normal. so it definitely has the feel of only partly being polite; it also seems to have a side agenda of announcing their religiosity, with perhaps an attempt to feel out yours.

now, to back off from the stark dichotomy a bit, i'll allow that many people were brought up (i.e., trained) to say "god bless you" when someone sneezes as an automatic gesture, and in practice, they likely don't think of it as religious. but the other, other hand, this then feels like making allowances for old people using racially insensitive words or tropes because that was accepted "in the old days".


in any event, i never pick fights about it, i just ignore it or say thank you and move on. but yeah, it rubs me the wrong way, "have a blessed day" more so than "god bless you", but i just mentally note them as probably at least a bit religiously insensitive/oblivious and deal with them accordingly.