Urban Legends

Urban legends are a kind of folklore consisting of stories often thought to be factual by those circulating them (see rumor). The term is often used with a meaning similar to the expression \"apocryphal story. more...

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\" Urban legends are not necessarily untrue, but they are often false, distorted, exaggerated, or sensationalized. Despite the name, urban legends do not necessarily take place in an urban setting. The name is designed to differentiate them from traditional folklore in preindustrial times.

Urban legends are sometimes repeated in news stories and, in recent years, distributed by e-mail. People frequently say such tales happened to a \"friend of a friend\"—so often, in fact, that \"friend of a friend\", or \"FOAF\", has become a commonly used term for this sort of story. In the Netherlands, a story about monkey meat gave rise to the term \"broodjeaapverhalen\" (i.e. monkey sandwich stories).

Some urban legends have survived a very long time, evolving only slightly over the years, as in the case of the story of a woman killed by spiders nesting in her elaborate hairdo. Others are new and reflect modern circumstances, like the story of people being anaesthetized and waking up minus a kidney surgically removed for transplant. Urban legends often are born of fears and insecurities, or specifically designed to prey on such concerns.

Origins

In 1969 Edgar Morin published a book (in French), “la Rumeur d’Orléans”, about a story circulated in the town of Orleans (France): the rumour was that girls disappeared in some shops in Orléans’ main street, that these shops were owned by Jewish people, and that the girls were sent to the Middle East as sexual slaves.

Jan Harold Brunvand professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah in the United States, used the term \"urban legend\" in print as early as 1979 (in a book review appearing in the Journal of American Folklore 92:362). However, even at that time folklorists and others had been writing about “urban legends” for a good while. Brunvand used his collection of legends, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings to make two points: first, that legends, myths, and folklore do not belong solely to so-called primitive or traditional societies; and second, that one could learn much about urban and modern culture by studying such legends. Brunvand has since published a series of similar books. The field also credits Brunvand as the first to use the term vector (after the concept of a biological vector) to describe a person or entity passing along an urban legend.

Structure

Most urban legends are framed as stories, with plots and characters. The urban legends resemble a proper joke, especially in the manner of transmission, only they are much darker in tone and theme.

The compelling nature of the story and its elements of mystery, horror, fear, or humor are part of what makes the tales so attractive. Many of these legends are presented as warnings or cautionary tales. Other urban legends might better be called \"widely dispersed misinformation\", such as the erroneous belief that you will automatically pass all of your college courses in a semester if your roommate kills himself . While such \"facts\" may not have the narrative elements of traditional legend, they are passed from person to person and generally have the elements of horror, humor or caution found in legends.

Read more at Wikipedia.org