I should write a whole book about household rituals. Scholars of the history of religion tell us that rituals come before their ideational content. So too speak, Masses were said even before there were words about Jesus. Even animals have rituals. Besides bower building birds and the like, ethnologists observed a recently captured dolphin pair, from a group that only ate squid, their specialization, swimming thrice around their tank with a fish they were fed held in both their mouths before consenting to eating it. Everyone has obsessions and compulsions that are pretty ritualized too, whether to "poor marriage choices" or shopping or eating or whatever.
Some of these rituals are cultural determined. One would be the placing of washed dishes in a special ritual container called a "dishwasher." It does not actually wash dishes, at least none of the ones I have seen do. You have to rinse the dish, remove all the particles or stuck on bits of food, wash off the grease, and then the "dishwasher" will perform a water based ritual, after which you "unload" it. The process is not any quicker or more convenient than washing the dishes "by hand," which is the ritual phrase for not using a dishwasher, which of course equally requires hands on.
Then there is urinating in the bathroom or rest room, formerly called the WC or water closet, signifying "toilet" in ritual terms, as actual references to urinating or defecating are taboo. The room in question is of course not for resting or bathing in this context. And I no one even knows what a water closet would be.
After urinating, the ritual is completed by washing your hands, formerly known as an ablution, a term of art for ritual washing. I'm not speaking here of defecating, as there are sound hygienic reasons for washing our hands after that exercise. Urine however is sterile. Unless you have a UTI, urinary tract infection. (You would know if you had a UTI.) Further, the bathroom itself is probably the cleanest room in your house, with surfaces deliberately designed for antiseptization. And if you bathed in the morning before putting on clean clothes, as most do, the organ in question may be he cleanest part of your body. It would make more sense to wash our hands before touching it. Not mush more sense though. So, in short, the exercise is a ritual. That is to say, an activity which has a symbolic meaning but no actual practical function.
Some of these rituals are cultural determined. One would be the placing of washed dishes in a special ritual container called a "dishwasher." It does not actually wash dishes, at least none of the ones I have seen do. You have to rinse the dish, remove all the particles or stuck on bits of food, wash off the grease, and then the "dishwasher" will perform a water based ritual, after which you "unload" it. The process is not any quicker or more convenient than washing the dishes "by hand," which is the ritual phrase for not using a dishwasher, which of course equally requires hands on.
Then there is urinating in the bathroom or rest room, formerly called the WC or water closet, signifying "toilet" in ritual terms, as actual references to urinating or defecating are taboo. The room in question is of course not for resting or bathing in this context. And I no one even knows what a water closet would be.
After urinating, the ritual is completed by washing your hands, formerly known as an ablution, a term of art for ritual washing. I'm not speaking here of defecating, as there are sound hygienic reasons for washing our hands after that exercise. Urine however is sterile. Unless you have a UTI, urinary tract infection. (You would know if you had a UTI.) Further, the bathroom itself is probably the cleanest room in your house, with surfaces deliberately designed for antiseptization. And if you bathed in the morning before putting on clean clothes, as most do, the organ in question may be he cleanest part of your body. It would make more sense to wash our hands before touching it. Not mush more sense though. So, in short, the exercise is a ritual. That is to say, an activity which has a symbolic meaning but no actual practical function.
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