Wednesday, March 12, 2008

How Urban Legends Work

Howstuffworks has an informative essay up on How Urban Legends Work. It was written by Tom Harris. Urban legends often become a part of folklore and history. What urban legend circulated today will be considered a historical fact by future historians? Which urban legends of ancient times are considered true today?

Parts of this article include:

1. Introduction to How Urban Legends Work

2. Types of Urban Legends

3. Friend of a Friend

4. Sources of Urban Legends

5. What Do Legends Mean?

6. Urban Legends and the Internet

7. Lots More Information

From the site:

Folklorists have come up with a number of definitions for urban legend. To many, a legend must be a story, with characters and some sort of plot. Others lump widely dispersed misinformation into the urban-legend category. For example, the erroneous belief that you will automatically pass all of your college courses in a semester if your roommate kills himself is generally considered to be an urban legend.


1 comment:

doughnuts said...

When I was a kid there was an urban myth that anything you photocopied with the new Xerox photocopiers was transferred to and stored in a secret file at Xerox. I actually believed this for a while. It could feasilbly be quite easy to achieve.