The Things We Do Without Thinking

It's Saturday, April eighteenth, and welcome to HigherIQ. Today we're doing something a little different. Instead of one deep story, we're looking at four things you do every day without ever asking why. You shake hands. You say "hello" on the phone. You measure distances in miles. You wear a wedding ring on your left hand. Each of these rituals has an origin that has nothing to do with the reason you perform it now. They're fossils from problems that no longer exist, preserved in your daily life like insects in amber. The handshake dates back to at least the fifth century BC in ancient Greece, where it appeared on funerary art, coins, and in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The most widely accepted theory for its origin is that extending your empty right hand to a stranger was a way of proving you weren't holding a weapon. The right hand is the sword hand for most people. Offering it empty was a statement: I could be attacking you, but I'm choosing not to. The up-and-down shaking motion, which seems like the most arbitrary part of the gesture, may have served a second purpose. Medieval knights reportedly clasped and shook each other's forearms to dislodge any knives hidden up sleeves. The Romans did something similar, grabbing the forearm rather than the hand, specifically to check for concealed blades. The physical gesture evolved from a security pat-down into a social ritual, but the underlying structure, extending your weapon hand and letting someone grip it, remains unchanged from its original function. The handshake became an everyday greeting much later, largely through the Quakers in seventeenth century England. They saw the handclasp as a more egalitarian alternative to bowing or tipping a hat, which were gestures that reinforced social hierarchy. By the 1800s, etiquette manuals included detailed guidance on proper handshaking technique. An 1877 guide warned that a gentleman who "rudely presses the hand offered him in salutation" should "never have an opportunity to repeat his offense." COVID nearly killed the handshake. In 2020, the fist bump, the elbow tap, and the awkward wave all made their bids to replace it. The handshake came back anyway. A gesture that originated as a weapons check between strangers who might kill each other survived a global pandemic. That's how deep the programming runs. When you answer the phone and say "hello," you're siding with Thomas Edison in a rivalry that played out in 1877. Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone, wanted people to answer with "ahoy." He borrowed the term from maritime culture, where it had been used for over a century as a greeting between ships. Bell used "ahoy" to answer his telephone for the rest of his life. His family reportedly continued the tradition for years after his death. Edison proposed "hello" in a letter dated August 15, 1877, writing to the president of a Pittsburgh telegraph company: "I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away." His argument was practical. "Hello" was loud, clear, and unmistakable. The first telephone book ever published, by the Connecticut District Telephone Company in 1878, included instructions telling users to begin conversations with "a firm and cheery hulloa." By 1880, Edison's version had won. The first telephone operators, who connected calls manually, became known as "hello girls." The word "hello" itself barely existed before the telephone. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its first published use to 1827, and even then it was an exclamation of surprise, not a greeting. Before the telephone, English speakers greeted each other with "good day," "how do you do," or "good morning." "Hello" as a standard greeting is less than a hundred and fifty years old. Every time you say it, you're using a word that was essentially invented to solve the problem of what to say when a machine connects you to someone you can't see. A mile is 5,280 feet, a number so specific and so odd that it practically begs for an explanation. The answer involves Roman soldiers, English farmers, and a queen. The word "mile" comes from the Latin "mille passus," meaning a thousand paces. A Roman pace was a double step, left foot then right foot, measuring roughly five feet. A thousand paces gave you the Roman mile: five thousand feet. This was a clean, logical number, and it served the Roman military well for centuries. Their empire was built on over two hundred and fifty thousand miles of roads, all measured by counting soldiers' footsteps. The problem came when the measurement collided with English agriculture. English farmers organized their land around the furlong, which was the length of a furrow that a team of oxen could plow before needing to rest. "Furlong" is a contraction of "furrow long." A furlong had become standardized at 660 feet, and the acre was defined in relation to it. Property deeds, tax records, and inheritance law all depended on the furlong. When England adopted the Roman mile, they wanted it to divide evenly into furlongs. The Roman mile of five thousand feet was roughly seven and a half furlongs, an awkward number for land management. In 1593, Queen Elizabeth I's Parliament passed a statute redefining the mile as exactly eight furlongs, or 5,280 feet. They added 280 feet to the Roman mile so that the math would work out for English farmers. The most commonly used unit of distance in the English-speaking world is 280 feet longer than it needs to be because of a sixteenth century compromise between military measurement and agricultural taxation. Today, only three countries, the United States, Myanmar, and Liberia, have not officially adopted the metric system. Thomas Jefferson actually proposed a decimal-based measurement system for the US in 1790, but his report was tabled in Congress and never acted on. France adopted the metric system three years later. The US almost had a rational measurement system. It got stuck in committee. The tradition of wearing a wedding ring on the fourth finger of the left hand comes from ancient Rome. The Romans believed that a vein, which they called the vena amoris or "vein of love," ran directly from that finger to the heart. The ring was placed there to symbolize a direct connection between the commitment and the organ that represented love. The vena amoris does not exist. There is no vein that runs uniquely from the fourth finger to the heart. The circulatory system doesn't work that way. Every finger has veins that connect to the heart through the same general venous system. The entire tradition is based on anatomy that a first-year medical student could disprove in minutes. It has persisted for over two thousand years anyway, across dozens of cultures, billions of weddings, and an industry worth over seventy billion dollars annually. The ring goes on the left hand, fourth finger, because ancient Romans were wrong about anatomy, and nobody has cared enough to change it since. Not every culture follows this convention. In Germany, Russia, Norway, and India, the wedding ring is worn on the right hand. In some traditions, the engagement ring goes on the left and the wedding ring on the right, or vice versa. The variation confirms the arbitrariness. There's no anatomical or practical reason for any particular finger. The tradition is a fossil of a mistaken belief about the body, repeated so many times it became sacred. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. You shake hands because ancient Greeks needed to prove they weren't armed. You say "hello" because Thomas Edison beat Alexander Graham Bell in a branding dispute in 1877. A mile is 5,280 feet because Queen Elizabeth's Parliament added 280 feet to accommodate English farmers. Your wedding ring is on your left hand because Romans believed in a vein that doesn't exist. None of these rituals have anything to do with why you perform them now. They're solutions to problems that disappeared centuries ago, preserved in your daily life because once a habit becomes universal, it becomes invisible. The things we do without thinking are almost always the things most worth thinking about. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.