Certain superstitions surround the act of yawning.
The most common of these is the belief that it is necessary to cover one's mouth when one is yawning in order to prevent one's soul from escaping the body. The Ancient Greeks believed that yawning was not a sign of boredom, but that a person's soul was trying to escape from its body, so that it may rest with the gods in the skies. This belief was also shared by the Maya.
Other superstitions include:
* A yawn is a sign that danger is near.
* Counting a person's teeth robs them of one year of life for every tooth counted. This is why some people cover their mouths when they laugh, smile, or yawn.
* If two persons are seen to yawn one after the other, it is said that the one who yawned last bears no malice towards the one who yawned first.
* If you don't cover your mouth while yawning, then the devil will come and rob your soul (Estonia).
* In some Latin American, east Asian and Central African countries yawning is said to be caused by someone else talking about you.
* A yawn may be a sign that one is afflicted by the evil eye (Greece).
* When one person yawns, it is said that anybody watching will instantly yawn as well
These superstitions may not only have arisen to prevent people from committing the faux pas of yawning loudly in another's presence ? one of Mason Cooley's aphorisms is "A yawn is more disconcerting than a contradiction" ? but may also have arisen from concerns over public health. Polydore Vergil (c. 1470?1555), in his De Rerum Inventoribus, writes that it was customary to make the sign of the cross over one's mouth, since "alike deadly plague was sometime in yawning, wherefore men used to fence themselves with the sign of the cross...which custom we retain at this day."
Others hold the superstition that when a person yawns, someone just walked over that person's future grave site or the future grave site of his or her children.
