(UK) Never heard of it. I do sometimes try to avoid opening opposite doors and/or windows if there’s a risk that the breeze will slam them about, but that’s a purely practical measure.
I’ve (American) generally loved cross-breezes, as it really refreshes the house. But last year I was kind of tired of the stale air in my apartment, and, seeing as there was a nice 70 degree (F) breeze outside, I decided to open the windows and let some fresh air in.
3 hours later I was beset with one of the worst attacks of the chills I’ve ever had, and felt like absolute crap for the next 4 days. Now correlation doesn’t necessarily = causation (as in I may have already contracted something beforehand), but make of that what you will.
I suppose it all comes down to just how cross the breeze happens to be that day. When it’s really grumpy , you’d know to be careful. 
Fan death is something I find odder than the “cross breeze” thing, if only because they actually think it will kill you, not just make you sick. The worst part is that doctors, scientists, and engineers in Korea, China, Japan, and other parts of Asia this has spread to believe in it too! I mean…these are people that know about physiology and/or thermodynamics, and should know better, but most of them believe it and continue to warn about the “dangers” of a fan being in a room while you’re asleep.
I can’t count how many times in Japan I’ve crawled back to my hotel room, fantasizing about some shut-eye after a 15-hour day, middle of summer, no air conditioning, and the f*cking maid has closed the goddam windows. Then I have to spend the next two hours opening windows, opening the door, strategically placing fans, sticking my head in the freezer, and waiting for it to get not hot enough to sleep. Happens in Russia all the time, too, even in winter, where they like to superheat your room with radiators you cannot turn off or down.
I live for the crossbreeze and the slow death of people that believe otherwise.
I have never heard of this in the UK either. In fact there seems to be more of a fear of houses being “stuffy”. As soon as the temperature noses above about 55 degrees (Fahrenheit), my relatives tend to fling open any available window to “get some fresh air in”.
That sounds about right to me too.
Wiki article on fan deaths, with a reference back to the Dope. It contains the science behind fan deaths, and the government’s position on taking precautions against them.
Widespread myth in Mexico, especially among older folks. I assume it was imported from Spain.
In Spain it is not about having “cross-breezes”… how the heck are you supposed to ventilate the house if not by opening every openable item the architect put in? When it’s been 40ºC in the shadow all day long, it’s gone down to a blessed 35ºC at night and you don’t have A/C, the only reason you don’t take a hammer to the walls is the need to close them back when the sun returns!
But you’re not supposed to stand or sit in the breeze thus created for long, or to go out of the house into a cold day with your hair wet (considered a possible cause for “head colds”).
People who know perfectly well about the existence of viruses still reckon that well, it’s still a better idea to not give your body any temperature shocks if you can help them, aye? After all, chilblains and “cut digestion” (1) are caused by sudden changes in temperature, aye? Bugs are more likely to breed in specific conditions and, since no doctor has proved that standing in the breeze with your head cold does not increase the risk of getting a cold, assume that the old wives’ hypothesis works, aye?
Note: the PhD thesis of a friend of mine carried, among others, the consequence of proving scientifically that a lot of “rules of thumb” or “old farmer’s ways” which a certain brand of “scientists” despised as unproven-therefore-unscientific do work. If it’s so with fruit trees, it may be so with other things, is the line of thought.
1: “corte de digestión” may happen when you eat something, wait long enough for digestion to begin and then jump into a cold pool. Chills, cramps, throwing up and generally needing rescue. It’s not a medical term, as a matter of fact docs get angry when they hear people use it, but hey… it does happen, duh! Who cares whether the technical term is “hyposomethingorother”!
Interesting. That explains the myth even more widespread in Mexico, even among some younger people, that you shouldn’t drink a cold beverage if you’ve been sweating on a hot day, unless you allow your body to cool down first.
Oh, I dunno. My grandparents were pretty strong on the whole subject of ‘drafts’ and the evil consequences thereof. Mind you they also thought a small gas fire on low was perfectly adequate for heating the living room of a large victorian apartment (room half the size of a tennis court with ten-foot ceilings, huge original windows and no insulation). A draft will kill you but watching TV in a room at 10c is just fine. :dubious:
It may be that the fear of drafts/cross-breezes is closely associated with listening too much to batty old relatives.
Yes! This in Italy as well. You should never drink something straight from the fridge on a hot day. You have to let it warm up a little before you drink or else terrible things will happen in your stomach and you will be very violently ill.
However, there is not the same taboo regarding ice cream…
Actually, that’s traditionally considered to be the cause of death for Phillip I “the beautiful”, the husband of Juana la Loca, son-in-law of Their Catholic Majesties and daddy of Emperor Charles V.
He’d been playing pelota mano (think squash with no paddles and only two walls), was sweating heavily, took a drink of very-cold, just-off-the-river water, got pneumonia and died in a couple days. Of course, the COD is more likely to be that the freshly-off-the-river water carried enough bugs to make a plowhorse sick…
Here in Troll Country, I’ve been warned about a cold draft causing a stiff neck, usually by people who know that I have problems with stress headaches anyway. I guess they think I’m more vulnerable to this phenomenon than normal people, since the muscles of my neck are already out to kill me.
However, Norskies are also firm believers in “airing out” a home from time to time even in the depths of winter, and when the warm weather comes they will open every window and door they can. So no general fear of cross-breezes, no.
Hm, my mom and dad both were raised to have the window open a little while sleeping, winter or summer. Mom is Iowa plattsdeutsch [amish/mennonite] and my dad was whitebread WASP with a german nanny and I had a german nanny.
I happen to like the bedroom to be ice cold, and a toasty warm bed with lots of fluffy comforters. Drives mrAru nuts as he is always freezing in the winter at night and wanting to shut the windows … sigh
My family also were the type to open the windows during the day to air out the house. My grandmothers maids always opened the windows in the day to air out the house as well, and the summer cottage had a sleeping porch - screened in, beds for my father and both uncles, and a couple of spares [one would assume for visiting friends and cousins] and the house in town had a screened in sleeping porch unpstairs of a screened in day porch on the ground floor.
I dont think my grandparents were of the same value nuttiness of Kellog as seen in the Road to Wellsville, but they definitely valued fresh air of whatever temperature…
bouv, I also was surprised at the prevalence of the very sincere belief in fan death. My student was a well-educated guy who managed a large logistics company but apparently had never given much thought to how the dreaded electric fan actually went about killing people. I couldn’t get anything more specific out of him than something vague about oxygen (the idea that fans create some kind of “vortex” that sucks the oxygen out of the room is mentioned in the Wiki article linked, I bet that’s what he was thinking of) and he looked at me like I had two heads when I told him I’d slept in a room with a fan running since I was a toddler.
Avoiding cold drinks when it’s cold outside is also very common in China. There was a small restaurant at the bottom of the international dorm where I lived and it took us months to convince them to keep a cooler plugged in so we could have something other than tepid Diet Coke on a 90F day. I could never get a very good explanation for that one.
When I was studying in Leningrad in 1989, I came down with a violent case of food poisoning. I was so sick that I lost my ability to stand up while on the bus to class; I literally had to lie down on the sidewalk until two classmates managed to hail a cab to take me back to the dorm. It was gone within 24 hours, after my body purged itself of whatever I’d eaten (I’ll spare you the gory details). I’ve never been THAT sick to my stomach before or since.
When my classmates dragged me into my dorm room, my Soviet roommates insisted that it was because I’d removed my lumpy, sagging mattress from the even saggier bedframe to use, futon-style, on the floor, in hopes of not completely screwing up my back. They would also yell at me whenever I would walk around in the dorm room in socks, or (God forbid) bare feet. Apparently to allow one’s body in such close proximity to the floor is to risk dire illness or possibly death. Didn’t matter if it was 85 degrees in the room and I was sweating. (Soviet dorm heating was notoriously erratic; it could be tropical, and the next day, you could see your breath.)