Have you ever been caught pandiculating in a public place? My wife gets annoyed when she catches me doing it anywhere. She thought once we were married, I’d quit. But we’ve been married a long time and I haven’t stopped.
Pandiculation, as I’m sure you know, is the act of yawning. We don’t know how long people have been yawning, but we do know how long people yawn for: on average, about six seconds. Your yawn may vary.
There is new research about this common human behavior. For a long time, scientists ignored it. In fact, there was more medical interest in eructation, which is not what you think it is. Oh, you think it is belching? Okay, then it is what you think it is. Scientists assumed people yawned when they were bored, but we’ve all seen video evidence of our elected representatives yawning during a congressional hearing, so that can’t possibly be the reason.
Whatever the real cause, I’ve always found it embarrassing. I’ll be talking to someone and suddenly I find myself yawning. That’s when the guy will will say, “I’m not boring you, am I?” Here’s my response: “Not at all. People yawn when the pressure in their ears differs from the outside pressure, or from the partial collapse of the air sacs in their lungs, prompting the brain to make them yawn, thus getting more oxygen into the lungs.”
“OK, Dick, now you’re boring me.”
My cat always yawns when she sees me. (Your pets do the same thing to you, don’t they? Please tell me they do.) And when I used to get undressed with my dog in the room, he’d take a look, and then he’d yawn. I tried not to take it personally.
My wife doesn’t yawn very much, which I thought was pretty good evidence of what a snappy conversationalist I am, but at times she exhibits paralinguistic respiration — meaning she sighs audibly. Unlike most cinema reviewers who employ either the thumbs-up or five-star criteria, Mary Ellen practices the sigh standard, exhibited most often when I drag her to a flick she really doesn’t want to see. Just to give you a few examples, a Bruce Willis film has always been good for three sighs. Years ago at an Arnold Schwarzenegger flick, she sighed so many times the man next to us thought she was in cardiac arrest and called 911.
Unlike a sigh, a yawn is involuntary. I was at a wedding and I desperately tried to suppress a yawn to not appear rude or uninterested in the ceremony. My face got all twisted and scrunched but I did manage to successfully incorporate the words “I do” into my pandiculation. Even the minister was impressed.
Some scientists believe yawning is a way of cooling your brain off. They proved this by studying research volunteers who had been deprived of sleep the night before and were asked to read a boring news article with an ice pack on top of their head. Very few yawned. I don’t know who paid for this study, but I wish they’d spent that money to find a cure for my gout.
I hope you think this topic was worth writing about. Personally, I don’t think it’s anything to sternutate at. You can look that one up. But here’s a hint: Gesundheit!
