An Old (Hiccup) Family (Hiccup) Remedy

One of my bloggy/Facebooky friends, Yellowdog Granny, posted on her Facebook status yesterday that she had the hiccups.

Right away, I thought, “Drink a glass of water with a pencil.”

What, you’ve never heard of that hiccup remedy?

Well, it’s just the most effective one there is!

What you do is take a pencil (or pen) and hold it lengthwise across the top of a glass of water…then drink the glass of water while making sure the pencil is under your nose the whole time.

It sounds weird, but it really does work. I think the pencil distracts you from breathing through your nose, so you drink the whole glass of water without stopping.

And in case you’re wondering (I’m sure you are; I know that this is the most fascinating topic ever), your finger will work in a pinch, if you don’t have a pen or pencil.

Anyway, so after I shared this old family remedy with Yellowdog Granny, I started to think:

Where the heck did that come from? Who was the first person to come up with this idea?

I can picture it now. (Cue flashback music.)

It’s the early 1920’s, and a bunch of guys are sitting around passing a reefer.

All of the sudden, one of them gets the hiccups really bad. He holds his breath for a few seconds, but then he starts to get paranoid that he might accidentally stop breathing for good. He lets the air out and hiccups again.

Then he tries to drink some water, but that doesn’t work. His friends try to scare the hiccups out of him, but that doesn’t work, either.

He starts to get really worried that he will have the hiccups forever.

Suddenly, he says, “I know! I’ll stick a pencil under my nose and drink some water!”

“Friend, that sounds like a bully idea!” says one of the other guys.

“Yes, a smashing idea!” says another.

And miraculously, it does work.

They are all surprised, and from then on, whenever anyone has the hiccups, they tell them about their “miracle hiccups cure.”

And somehow, eventually, somewhere down the line, one of my relatives finds out about it…and thus it becomes an old family remedy.

What? It could happen.

But of course, it didn’t. My curiosity about the hiccups remedy got the best of me, and I called my Mom to find out if she knew anything about where it came from.

“Oh, that’s from a long time ago,” she said. “I think I read it in “Woman’s Day” or one of those women’s magazines.”

She read it in a magazine? That’s it?

Hmm, sometimes stories are much more interesting in the imagination. Still, who was the first person to come up with that idea?

We may never know.