My Dad and others of my parents’ generation - born during the war and in the ten years or so after it - used the word a lot, but I don’t hear it from younger people. As I kid I thought it was cazundhite.
I personally generally use ‘Bless You’ but it wouldn’t seem strange to use gesundheit.
I used to work with a colleague who’s family was from Vietnam. Whenever he or someone nearby sneezed, his rote response was “Getting all the devils out”.
Whenever I hear “Goesintight” here in Northern California, I respond “comes out loose”. Either quizzical or shocked looks ensue.
eastern pa is heavily pa dutch so it is very common. and very automatic.
uncle bill, i also suprized a sneezing german speaker. i was ringing up a purchase for a customer when her companion sneezed, i gesundheit-ed. she was very surprized and asked “deutch”? i replied “nein” and then explained to my customer that any german i knew was very spotty and mostly words learned from instruction manuals.
there are many jokes set around gesundheit… the main one being when one says something incomprehensible and the other person responds gesundheit.
“you’re so good looking” really didn’t catch on as an alternative for sneezing.
Gesundheit is pretty common up here, too.
(It’s always weird to be reading about the German government and hear about the Ministerium für Gesundheit.)
I doubt that was it in my case. Texas is a big state, and the German settlements were pretty much all in the southern part, where the farmland was good and the scenery pretty. The Hill Country, as your links says. They still have German festivals there. I’m thinking New Braunfels and that area. I grew up far, far away in a huge desolate region with no mass settlements. It took 20th-century technology to build up that area at all really.
Note that the very first example listed (from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) uses “Bless you” as the punch line, so the joke isn’t limited to “gesundheit”.
Cheers,
bcg
I always thought “Gesundheit,” while normal in German, was used in the US as a kind of atheist or agnostic statement. There’s not God involved if you’re just saying “health.”
The members of my family, most of whom are devout Roman Catholics (I’m the black sheep of the family), would probably be insulted by that statement. As I mentioned upthread, I picked up the habit from my mom’s side of the family, who were not long removed from the boat that brought them to the US from Germany.
Granted, I’ve always used it since losing the faith, but I also used it exclusively before I turned apostate, so you can’t really judge anything from my behavior. I can’t say I’ve really noticed any correlation between one’s lack of religious belief and one’s propensity to say “gesundheit” vice “bless you” when someone sneezes, but I don’t have too many atheist friends who are so “in yer face” about their disbelief that I’d feel compelled to challenge their saying “bless you” in response to a sneeze just to give them crap about it.
Cheers,
bcg
This is nonsense; -heit and -keit mean exactly the same, the only reason German uses one instead of the other is phonologic: -keit is used when the adjective preceding it ends in -g or -ch for instance (Geschwindigkeit - speed). So Gesundheit is a combination of gesund, healthy, and -heit, -ness. Similarly, Krankheit is a combination of krank, ill, and -heit, ness, and it means illness.
Actually, it has to do with whether the adjective ends in a suffix such as -ig, -ich, -bar, -sam or -el (Übelkeit, Einsamkeit, Verhältnismässigkeit) or not. Forget what I said about phonological reasons, that’s all Dummheit.
[more than you ever wanted to know mode]
“heit” and “keit” are both a suffix to build an abstract substantive from (almost forgotten) nouns, participles and adjectives. The built substantives all have a feminine gender – which gives non-native speakers at least some help in their plight to learn when we use the masculine (der), feminine (die) or neuter (das) article.
“heit” is the older suffix and was once a noun with masculine gender: goth. haidus meant something like manner, mode, method.
In Middle High German (Mittelhochdeutsch = mhd.) it changed its gender to feminine and the meaning shifted towards “type” or “kind”.
Grimm wrote that a misunderstanding in the pronunciation of nominalized adjectives ending in “ig” led finally to the suffix “keit”: e.g., “Ewigkeit” (eternity) was in mhd. “êwicheit”, meaning êwik-heit (in mhd. the final sound of a “g” was a “c” sounding like a “k”). So, the “ch” in “êwicheit” was pronounced like a “k” which led to the idea that there was a “keit” ending.
[/more than you ever wanted to know mode]
I hope you won’t mind: “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”, is probably what she actually said, unless she was channeling John Cleese.
Oh, and “Schweinhunt” is “American tv”-German; you could say “Schweinehund” but no one would … or, if someone did it would be proof of a time machine transferring Germans from the Bismarck-era into our time.
Shudder.
I was hoping someone else would remember the Seinfeld reference. 
I usually say “Bless you,” but “Gesundheit” is not totally unknown around here. My mother, raised in Depression-era New Jersey, would always say “God bless you” at the first sneeze, and add “And may he keep you!” if you sneezed a second time.
I say Gesundheit because I think it’s funny and my German uncle taught it to me when I was little. Nobody else says it but they understand it. (Massachusetts)
My apologies, then.
:o
I’ll have to remember that, adding “… as far away from me as possible!” if s/he sneezes a third time.
Cheers,
bcg (because if anyone has a cold within a mile’s radius, I wind up catching it. Guaranteed!)
Was going to post the same thing. It seems like a much higher percentage of Jews use “gesundheit” than the population at large.
At the third sneeze, does she say “And may he lift up his face to shine upon you!”?
No, but that’s a good idea!
gesundheit is funnier punchline than bless you. a mumbles something, b responds in german, big laugh. a mumbles something, b responds in english, little laugh.
saltier, i thought the irish version translated out to “bless me”. which i thought was amusing because most bless the sneezer not the sneezee, and the irish turned it around.
my irish books are out of my reach right now, but i’ll have to give it another look when i can.