The first time I was exposed to the "Five Second Rule" was in a commercial with Jeff Goldblum that started airing sometime this year. I don't know if the commercial is what coined the phrase, but if it did not, then I must live in a cultural area of the United States that has only recently been exposed to this rule.

The Five Second Rule is that if you drop a piece of food, especially something tasty like a cookie or a piece of candy, then it's still clean enough to be edible to pick up and eat so long as it doesn't continue to stay in contact with the floor longer than five seconds.

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.

The advent of the Five Second Rule seems to have changed people's attitudes. I have never required something like a "Five Second Rule" to justify consuming floor-touched food, but now I have observed numerous people, from friends to co-workers to strangers in public places, drop some item of food and say, "Oh well, five second rule, right?" and eat it up.

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?

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. The creation of the relatively new term "road rage" may not have created the phenomenon it signifies (then again, after all, the words to describe "road rage" existed before the term -- "rage at other drivers on the road" is sufficient to convey the idea), but I think it's fairly obvious that the coining of the term is what allowed it to be universally recognized as a phenomenon that happens. Before the term "road rage" existed, the phenomenon still happened, but it did not exist as a singular idea. I think a case can be made that the birth of the term, not the beginnings of the phenomenon, is what brought the phenomenon to the forefront of our cultural consciousness and perhaps, too, increases people's tendencies to act with rage toward other drivers on the road in the first place, if for no better reason than the idea of getting enraged at other drivers for improprieties on the road IS an idea in the forefront of our minds.

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.

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.

I would be, therefore, thankful, in a way, that I've been eating freshly-dropped food off the floor (bathroom floors and many floors in public places excluded) since years before I ever heard the term "Five Second Rule."