Old Wives' Tale Unprovable Folklore

If Your Ears Are Burning, Someone's Talking About You

"A sudden burning or tingling sensation in your ear means someone, somewhere, is talking about you."

Genuinely ancient, not a modern invention. Pliny the Elder records the belief in his Naturalis Historia in the 1st century AD: a burning right ear meant someone was praising you, a burning left ear meant the opposite. Chaucer references the same idea in Troilus and Criseyde in the 1380s, and a 16th century poem, "Of the Burning of the Eares" by James Yates, deals with it directly. There's no mechanism connecting a stray physical sensation to what someone else happens to be saying elsewhere, so this isn't really "busted" so much as it was never a testable claim in the first place, just two thousand years of continuous superstition.

Sources: Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia (1st century AD); Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (1380s).

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