Over the past many months, I’ve been sifting through every source imaginable on kissing. I’ve read papers on anthropology and dentistry, spoken to neuroscientists and classicists, and searched through many pop culture references as well. It’s been fascinating and fun, but one peculiar ‘trivia fact‘ I kept coming across bothered me:
‘Kissing for one minute burns 26 calories.’
Preposterous of course, but I couldn’t help wonder why ’26′ was popping up everywhere. It seemed so random. Obviously this is not in the book, but I was increasingly curious as to how and where the rumor got started.
Today I finally solved the mystery:
September 25th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Great brainstorming to finally solve the mystery.
September 25th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Chris and Sheril, for some reason when I saw this I thought it was perfect commentary on the communication process, and I thought of the Intersection among other places:
http://www.unshelved.com/archive.aspx?strip=20090829
September 25th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
Hmm, this sounds very much like a semantic analogue of zoonotic processes. It appears that the number jumped across the semantic divide inside somebody’s mind and infected the verb-meaning of the term.
Gadzooks! This suggests a horrible fate for humanity! What if the meaning of a word were to jump the semantic divide concerning the concept of semantics — with our sense of meaning compromised, our language comprehension would steadily erode away. It would be {shudder} “Semantic AIDS”!!!!
September 26th, 2009 at 3:27 am
SK, I’m curious how many of those kissing trivia and facts that you linked to were borne out by your research?
September 26th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
@4 Cain,
The site I linked to was the first to pop up doing a search for an example with ’26′, but I wasn’t using these kind of sources. Let’s just say ‘trivia’ items like this didn’t make the manuscript.
September 28th, 2009 at 12:45 am
A standard metric kiss would probably be determined by the French. So who’s to say 26 calories is wrong?
January 17th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
[...] wrote about debunking the 26-calorie kiss on the Discover blog. The blog entry is dated Sept. 25, [...]