elstaffe > Recent Status Updates

"Women invented kulning out of their own longings," (239) I rolled my eyes extremely hard at this

"Any unfamiliar sound sends them pronking back to the flock that is their food, their safety, their everything." (177) PRONKING

"the ancestors got together and each threw in their best dream" I love this

"If you meet with a lion or a mad bull, or anything of that kind, all you have to do is to look them right in the eye, and they won't touch you. If they do, that proves you did not properly catch the eye of the creature that charged you." (101) no true Scotslion

"The young woman who is fond of cats will be an old maid.
...
If a girl likes cats better than dogs, that is a sign she will never marry." (87) the cat lady archetype goes way back

"A boy out for a walk will sometimes count all the bows he gets from his friends, and make a cross for each one on a piece of paper that he carries for the purpose. Later he buries the paper. This is supposed to insure his finding as many dollars as he received bows." (72) I only realized this was "bow" as in "take a bow" and not "bow" as in "hair-bow" at the very end of this

"There is once in a while a man who, when he sneezes, says, 'God bless it,' that the sneeze may bring him good luck. If he hears someone else sneeze, he helps them to good luck by saying, 'God bless you.'" (61)

"Wear an eelskin around your waist to keep off rheumatism. Some say they had rather have the rheumatism." (49)

"Eat poison ivy, and it will never poison you afterward. When this remedy is mentioned, the comment usually is, 'Well, I guess it wouldn't. You wouldn't live to give it the chance.'" (48)

"When you and a companion are walking together, don't allow a third person to go between you. If you do, it will out your friendship. Nevertheless, if, in spite of precautions, this should happen, say, 'Bread and butter,' and the fates will be propitiated." (44)

"Sleep before midnight is 'beauty sleep.' Therefore if you wish to be handsome go to bed early." (43)

"Often when two persons make a bargain they at its conclusion 'Shake hands on it' to make it binding." (39) wild to see this shown up in a slew of other folkloric traditions that have not persisted as equivalently common at one point

"Eat the blossoms of three innocents, and the next person of the opposite sex that you meet will be the one you are to marry." (35) I beg your pardon?

"One might fancy, from the number of sayings and superstitions that can be readily picked up, that there was as yet no real folklore decadence." (6) I don't know that I've ever seen the word decadence used this way before, either

"There are many believers in the significance of dreams, and they can give plenty of instances in their own experience and that of others to show a good foundation for their faith. I suppose this faith and apparent proof grow out of the fact that we remember odd coincidences, and forget the many times when we dreamed and nothing came of it." (5)

" and as to when things portend disaster.
I do not know that any of the signs gathered are natives of New England by right of invention. I suppose most can be traced to a foreign ancestry, just as they say all the old jokes can be traced back to Noah. Yet if Yankee cuteness did not share in the originating of them, it has given its peculiar local twist to a large number of them." (4) Yankee cuteness?

"Perhaps no class is more addicted to sign-telling and belief in signs than those who have emigrated to this country in comparatively recent years. It is their children at the schools who are most apt to keep the rest posted as to what means what, and as to when things portend disaster." (4) those credulous foreigners

"He cites an appeal by the American educator Felix Adler ... that 'there should be "less of falsehood, gluttony, drunkenness and evil in general" than in the usual tellings' and 'that malicious stepmothers and cruel fathers should be excluded." He adds, 'The same need has been widely felt by parents and teachers.'" (xix-xx)

"[Johnson] prefaces each early book with a note that he has retained 'the interest, the charm and all the sweetness' of the stories but dropped the 'savagery, distressing details and excessive pathos' of 'that barbaric past when the tales originated.'" (xix)

"In America as in Europe his interests always lay more in the byways than the highways, and he avoided big cities as too cosmopolitan to be typical." (xiii) early example of "the only real typical people are truck drivers at a diner" attitude. For a folklorist I guess it's more excusable, but still

"[image caption] A sea lion follows a white shark. This is probably NOT a good idea." (25)

"deliberately vague, somewhere in 7 to 10 and maybe 72" (4,294,967,291) a good index listing

"Having bar codes caused situations where the patients and drugs were less thoroughly checked than they were before. If a new system is implemented, humans can be very resourceful when finding new ways to make mistakes.

It can be very dangerous when humans get complacent and think they know better than the math." (3)

"Originally an April Fools' joke, connected teapots have of course since been made and run according to HTCPCP. An attempt to remove this error in 2017 was defeated by the Save 418 Movement, which preserved it as 'a reminder that the underlying processes of computers are still made by humans.'" (14)

"Always hilarious, internet engineers have designated error code 418 as I'm a teapot. It is returned by any internet-enabled teapots that are sent a request to make coffee. It was introduced as part of the 1998 release of Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) specifications." (15)

"For this reason, programmers can leave 'comments' in their code, which are little messages to anyone else who has to read their code. The programmer mantra should be 'Always comment on your code.' And make the comments helpful. I've reviewed dense code I wrote years before, to find the only comment is 'Good luck, future Matt.'" (24)

"'While the printed version is good, I would have expected the publisher to have an audiobook version as well.'" (32)

"If you have not done so before, you must read the online reviews of books of random numbers. You'd think people would not have much to say about lists of random digits, but this vacuum brings out the creativity in people.
...
'Don't turn to the last page and spoil the book by finding out the ending. Make sure you read from page 1 and let the tension build.'" (32)

"Debbie said, 'School's all finished for the summer, Mog. Isn't it exciting!' Mog said nothing. She didn't like things to be exciting. She liked them to be the same."

"'I would suggest,' said Jim, 'that we look primarily at the evergreens. They are very ancient. They were here on earth before the insects. They are pollinated by the winds and, unlike other plants, do not depend on insects for anything. They can afford to kill them.'" (144-145)