Flat Earth
I mentioned in a post elsewhere the 'myth' of the flat earth theory, and I wonder how many other myths we subscribe to without knowing?
In short, the Greeks, Christendom, the Medieval World, Christopher Columbus - none of 'em thought the world was flat - it's not properly a myth, but a fiction, presented for dubious reasons (Google it to read the evidence) which would introduce religion into the debate, so I'll leave it there.
As I understand it, the Columbus debate was not the earth was flat, but that without charts, or a certainty as to how big the world was, he was off on a wing and a prayer...
Ring-a-ring-of-roses
That well know children's rhyme from the 13-16th century age of plagues?
Nope. An invention of university professors in the 1930s. The rhyme itself, and its variants, were first recorded in the 1880s, and the variants having nothing to do with the plague, either directly or by any stretch of the imagination ...
What is intriguing is how old tales turn up:
A single busineswoman gets home from work to her plush NY apartment, opens the door to find her dog choking in the hall. She takes the dog to the vet, leaves him there and returns home. This time opens the door as the phone rings, and the police tell her to leave immediately. The vet has found two fingers lodged in the dog's throat, and the cops (arriving moments later) find a wounded and desperate burglar hiding in her apartment! (Pretty stupid to hang around with 2 fingers missing, but there you go.)
This is a retelling of the old tale of the faithful hound ... can't remember it quite properly, so I won't do the injustice of mangling it. If you want the tale, post and I'll dig it out...
Faeries
This is a doozy. Our common notion of fairies owes more to four men, authors working in the late nineteenth century, who wrote, rewrote or re-edited fairy tales of antiquity to suit the taste for romantic literature.
Prior to this, in every culture going back to Persia and beyond, fairies were at best tricksters who could not be trusted, at their worst cruel and capricious spirits, their sole aim to steal human children and replace them with ancient and decrepit faeries enchanted to look like babies, but with a foul nature ... (faeries, it seems, had difficulty conceiving, and difficulty in getting rid of their old)
In the Middle Ages it was an acceptable defence, in law, to insist the child a parent had killed was a fairy, that the child was evil, possessed of the 'evil eye' ... psychologists and those with a working knowledge of severe post-natal depression might spot how this came about to explain infanticide ...
... so there is every chance that the fairy myth was developed to explain why some parents inexplicably fail to bond with, abandon, and even kill, their offspring?
Fol-de-Rol
You know that Elizabethan 'with a hey-diddle-diddle' stuff - well many English folk songs and rhymes were recorded (on paper) for posterity by Victorian do-good philanthropists, who decided to, ehm, excise the, er, more, shall we say 'colourful' verses from the songs?
So the 'rich' and often ribbald language was edited away, and replaced by some meaningless wordplay, the equivalent of a radio 'beep', to keep the metre.
Thomas
(BTW this is all an avoidance technique -I have an essay due the day after tomorrow - what the **** am I doing here?)
I mentioned in a post elsewhere the 'myth' of the flat earth theory, and I wonder how many other myths we subscribe to without knowing?
In short, the Greeks, Christendom, the Medieval World, Christopher Columbus - none of 'em thought the world was flat - it's not properly a myth, but a fiction, presented for dubious reasons (Google it to read the evidence) which would introduce religion into the debate, so I'll leave it there.
As I understand it, the Columbus debate was not the earth was flat, but that without charts, or a certainty as to how big the world was, he was off on a wing and a prayer...
Ring-a-ring-of-roses
That well know children's rhyme from the 13-16th century age of plagues?
Nope. An invention of university professors in the 1930s. The rhyme itself, and its variants, were first recorded in the 1880s, and the variants having nothing to do with the plague, either directly or by any stretch of the imagination ...
What is intriguing is how old tales turn up:
A single busineswoman gets home from work to her plush NY apartment, opens the door to find her dog choking in the hall. She takes the dog to the vet, leaves him there and returns home. This time opens the door as the phone rings, and the police tell her to leave immediately. The vet has found two fingers lodged in the dog's throat, and the cops (arriving moments later) find a wounded and desperate burglar hiding in her apartment! (Pretty stupid to hang around with 2 fingers missing, but there you go.)
This is a retelling of the old tale of the faithful hound ... can't remember it quite properly, so I won't do the injustice of mangling it. If you want the tale, post and I'll dig it out...
Faeries
This is a doozy. Our common notion of fairies owes more to four men, authors working in the late nineteenth century, who wrote, rewrote or re-edited fairy tales of antiquity to suit the taste for romantic literature.
Prior to this, in every culture going back to Persia and beyond, fairies were at best tricksters who could not be trusted, at their worst cruel and capricious spirits, their sole aim to steal human children and replace them with ancient and decrepit faeries enchanted to look like babies, but with a foul nature ... (faeries, it seems, had difficulty conceiving, and difficulty in getting rid of their old)
In the Middle Ages it was an acceptable defence, in law, to insist the child a parent had killed was a fairy, that the child was evil, possessed of the 'evil eye' ... psychologists and those with a working knowledge of severe post-natal depression might spot how this came about to explain infanticide ...
... so there is every chance that the fairy myth was developed to explain why some parents inexplicably fail to bond with, abandon, and even kill, their offspring?
Fol-de-Rol
You know that Elizabethan 'with a hey-diddle-diddle' stuff - well many English folk songs and rhymes were recorded (on paper) for posterity by Victorian do-good philanthropists, who decided to, ehm, excise the, er, more, shall we say 'colourful' verses from the songs?
So the 'rich' and often ribbald language was edited away, and replaced by some meaningless wordplay, the equivalent of a radio 'beep', to keep the metre.
Thomas
(BTW this is all an avoidance technique -I have an essay due the day after tomorrow - what the **** am I doing here?)
