LL-L "Lifestyles" 2005.08.18 (08) [E]

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From: Ben J. Bloomgren <godsquad at cox.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language use" 2005.08.18 (02) [E]

I meant it litterally, people that don't wash themselves ;) Or maybe once a
month.

Diederik, your post made me think of an experience that a former coworker
had with his Dutch great-aunt. She and her husband visited their family here
in Arizona. They stayed for six weeks, and they took a grand total of one
shower. He said that it was unbelievable to smell their place. He said that
the young people in the Netherlands know how to use bath tubs and showers,
but he said that his great-aunt and great-uncle are in their eighties. What
is your experience with that as well as the others on the list?
Ben

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Lifestyles

Hi, Ben!

I hope you don't mind me jumping in here.

As far as I know, this bathing thing or the scarcity thereof is an old-time 
thing, preserved especially among elderly rural inhabitants who didn't 
change old-time ways despite modern conveniences.  It is not 
country-specific, though Americans (including most Latin Americans), 
Canadians and Australians notice it most often with Europeans, especially 
with North Europeans, that they bathe and shower less frequently.  But this 
will soon be a thing of the past, since people middle-aged and younger take 
advantage of modern facilities and have hygienic habits like those of their 
overseas relatives.

In the olden days, very few people had bathrooms, and showers were even 
rarer.  They had outhouses if they were lucky, hardly ever had running water 
inside their houses even less than a hundred years ago.  Bathing used to be 
a real pain in the buttensky: you'd have to drag the old metal tub inside 
the house, usually into the kitchen, lug water from a well or pump, heat it 
in large pots on the wood or coal stove, pour it into the tub ... It was 
such a production that it rarely happened more than once a week, usually 
Saturday nights in preparation for church the next morning (and thank 
goodness for that). More than one family member tended to use the same 
water, usually just topped up with some more hot water ...  Why more so in 
Northern Europe?  Well, it's pretty darn cold there much of the year, and 
many people didn't have enough fuel for that sort of "luxury."  Until the 
late 19th century the same applied to the aristocracy and the wealthy, hence 
much need for perfumes and other masking agents.  You'll find very similar 
conditions among other cold weather cultures, especially in arctic regions 
and among desert and steppe nomads as well as in high altitude cultures 
(such as the Himalayas and the Andes), as I have had to learn on several 
trips (such as on crowded overland buses).

It is not as though it was much different in North America and Australia. 
European pioneers lived pretty much the same way.  Many of those pioneer 
cabins stood in the middle of nowhere in icy, windswept places of, say, 
North Dacota or Alberta.  You wouldn't have found bathing facilities in 
them, or even outside them.  Why, some old-time physicians even went around 
telling people that too much bathing was bad for their health!  Cowboys 
tended to take a real bath at the end of a cattle drive, when they were in 
town and had a couple of dimes for booze and for a shave and a bath at the 
barber's.  Americans were just ahead of Europe later on, in the early 20th 
century.  In the warmer parts of the Americas and in most of Australia a 
great deal of sweating called for more bathing, and it wasn't a big deal to 
take cold dips in the old billabong or whatever.  Indigenous Americans and 
Siberians tended to be tougher lots.  They took cold dips in icy rivers and 
lakes, and they also tended to be less afraid, or not afraid at all, of 
nudity, thus did not have to sneak around to find rare moments of privacy 
and then consider several remaining layers of clothing "undress" ...

You still find remnants of an ancient sweat-lodge and cold dip cultures, a 
type of religious bathing culture, among Finns, Karelians, Estonian, 
Livians, Veps and Saami as a part of their ancestral Siberian heritage, thus 
non-European heritage, anomalies in old-time Northern Europe.  I strongly 
suspect that North Europeans owe the Finnic peoples (and probably also the 
Hungarians) thanks for their influences in this regard.  (I've never felt 
cleaner, healthier and more rested than when I stayed in Finland. Jumala 
siunatkoon Suomea!)

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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