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National Kissing Day: Twitter Users Celebrate World Kiss Day With Digital Kisses

By Dan Evon
Published on: 05:00 PST, Jul 6, 2012

Happy National kissing Day. Or International Kissing Day. Or World Kiss Day. Whatever you call it, go out and give someone you love a kiss. And if that person isn’t in kissing distance, you can join several Twitter users who are sending out photos of their favorite kisses.

So why celebrate the kiss? Well, it’s one of our oldest practices.

According to Wired, the kiss has been around in literature for more than 3500 years. The first evidence of a kiss in literature appeared in India’s Vedic Sanskrit texts. The word “kiss” wasn’t mentioned but the text does describe “licking,” and “drinking moisture of the lips.”

The Daily Beast reports that the “kiss” is also found in the Old Testament which was assembled approximately 1200 years before the birth of Christ.

Kissing has also been in famous works like Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Histories by Herodotus, Indian epic poem Mahabharata, and of course, 50 Shades Of Grey.

In William Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet, Romeo describes a kiss, saying:

“If I profane with my unworthiest hand / This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand / To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”

William Goldman writes in The Princess Bride:

“There have been five great kisses since 1642 B.C. when Saul and Delilah Korn’s inadvertent discovery swept across Western civilization. (Before then couples hooked thumbs.) And the precise rating of kisses is a terribly difficult thing, often leading to great controversy, because although everyone agrees with the formula of affection times purity times intensity times duration, no one has ever been completely satisfied with how much weight each element should receive. But on any system, there are five that everyone agrees deserve full marks. Well, this one left them all behind.”

The kiss has been a sign of affection, a cause of sexual arousal, and an expression of trust. According to the Daily Beast, people in the Middle Ages (most of whom were illiterate) would sign contracts with an “X” and then seal the agreement with a kiss.

Here are some digital kisses that were sent out on Twitter in honor of National Kissing Day.

And of course, here is the greatest kiss of all time.

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