> The infusion of the Five Second Rule into the mindset of the people I see around me has had a fascinating effect. Previously, at least 90% of the people I have ever associated with would cringe at the thought of picking something off the floor and eating it. If it touches the floor, it is automatically unfit for human consumption. When people would see me pick up and consume an item of food that I have dropped, I would get all kinds of cringing and wincing and unappetizing verbal exclamations.
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> The advent of the Five Second Rule seems to have changed people's attitudes.
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Man, this is a mouthful to say, but acceptable limits to sociocultural "etiquette" are modified by the thread of common cultural perception.

The acceptance of the Germ Theory of disease in public awareness probably dictated that eating "germy" dropped food off the floor was distasteful. Sure, it's *possible* that you could pick up flesh-eating Strep-A bacteria, or planar warts, from eating from the floor. You might even get toxoplasmosis parasites from sharing food with your cat or dog. On the other hand, the moment you put food on a "clean" dinner table itself, your victuals are getting showered with all sorts of spores, microfilaments, and infectious campylobacter anyway. So unless you live and eat inside a bubble, you can't get away from external germs.

Besides, people who live in "germ-free" houses, i.e. houses that have been sanitized to death, actually tend to be sicker and suffer from more allergens -- because the human immune system is being insufficiently challenged in a germ-free environment.

So while I think that eating food which has been dropped on the floor is not necessarily harmful, I'm not too thrilled that the perceptual "breakthough" has been promoted by a commercial which, at core, is illogical. The effective number of "floor germs" which end up on the piece of food is going to be consistent -- regardless of whether the item was on the floor for three seconds or for three-quarters of a minute.


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> My observations have hardly been scientifically controlled, but even so I wonder if they are at all accurate. Is it true that people are now less queasy about eating floor-touched food now that there is a publically recognizable *name* for a principle that defends the acceptability of doing so?
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Is there a *name* for the concept of publicly recognizing a new paradigm which previously had no name?


> Names and words have power. Some believe that ideas can't be consciously realized unless the words to describe them also exist. I think there is a lot of truth to that. [...] Before the term "road rage" existed, the phenomenon still happened, but it did not exist as a singular idea.
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Words and phrases have power to alter the consciousness for good and for evil. IDEAS can be realized and described in other words; but PERCEPTIONS are transmogrifed by catch-all phrases which will stick in the forefront of thought. Consider the term "Honest Abe." Constrast that with "Slick Willy" Clinton, or "Tricky Dick" Nixon. Look at the phrase "slapped down like a red-haired stepchild." And finally, consider the term "Frankenfoods" to describe GMO plants, which have been modified to require *fewer* pesticides and herbicides... and yet they are still perceived to be "bad." Even when the household microwave oven was first introduced, I remember how people used to joke that "nuking food in the microwave" would cause cancer and leukemia in children.


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> Similarly, I wonder if the advent of the term "five second rule" has coalesced a nebulous concept into a firm one and gotten people to recognize the act of "dropping food on the floor, picking it up, and having the option of eating it or throwing it away" as a singular idea and encouraged people to consider the "eating" alternative as an "acceptable" alternative, from both health and social standpoints.
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> If all this is accurate, then some interesting things are implied about how easily influenced we are by the language we speak and the household terminology we use.
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Yep. I really think Ellmyruh would be the person to ask about media-mediated cultural consciousness. I'm not sure that Sam's post was so much about the "Five Second Rule" as a discussion on structural semiotic analysis :-)

Wolf ");- does not want to have KILLED Sam's Five Second discussion thread with this tedious academic assay, so POST something, dagnabit!" spirit