Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child

Subject: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 05:33 AM

First off, I would rather not get into the whole religion thing so, if you don't mind, keep it off here please :-)

On another thread someone was trying to get to the bottom of a rumour he had heard about a charity. It was compared to the rumours you heard about where babies come from. I don't recall ever being told anything about cabbages or gooseberry bushes but I have a vague recollection of a stork being involved. I am sure there are other things that you will recollect like getting 'the mange' from touching a dirty article or person, or about not standing on the cracks in pavements. Where do these tales come from? How did they originate? Are they global and do different cultures have different childhood rumours?

Just interested :-)

Cheers

DtG

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 05:47 AM

Of course babies are brought by storks.
Haven't you seen the documentary "Dumbo"?

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST,Raggytash
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 05:52 AM

I never got the chance to find out if there was any truth in the rumour that Diane West dropped them for certain.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 06:01 AM

I believe there were similar rumours about Diana Dors. Hence the two different calls for '44' in Bingo, either:
All the fours, Diana Dors, or
All the fours, droopy drawers.

Or I could be making this up.
All rumours have to start somewhere, and they never seem to start with a named person, it is always "I heard from someone that . . .". Just like "Urban Myths".

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST, topsie
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 06:27 AM

My mother told me where babies came from - but she never told me how they got there.

I do remember rumours, or beliefs, about food. My grandmother told me that you mustn't eat bread or cakes when they are still hot from the oven because that would give you indigestion.

She also said that if you had a sponge pudding (which was made using the same recipe as for sponge cake, but served with custard), you should never let it go cold because eating it cold would give you indigestion.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Doug Chadwick
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 07:02 AM

Beware of swans. They can break your arm with their beaks.

Has anybody actually met someone who's arm was broken by a swan?

DC

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: banjoman
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 07:13 AM

Eating chips on a Sunday was a sin.
I also was told that kettles were knitted from steel wool

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 07:23 AM

I was always told as a child, and I believed, that if I wore clean underwear, then I wouldn't be run over by a bus. Not sure whether or not I still believe it....too risky to tempt fate!

I was also told that if I smiled at a nun, my teeth would turn green. I've taken a chance on that one on many occasions with no ill effect.

And, again on a religious theme, my mother always insisted that only Catholic girls had their ears pierced. I later found this rumour to be incorrect on three levels....

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Greg F.
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 09:08 AM

Beware of swans. They can break your arm with their beaks.

Actually, its their wings used to break arms (and other things), and yes they can.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 09:10 AM

If you didn't eat your crusts your hair would never have curly hair. I used to tell my Mum that I didn't want curly hair anyway :-) I guess the origins of that are in stopping food wastage, but why link it with curly hair?

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 09:11 AM

Your hair would never have curly hair? Maybe she should have said if I didn't eat my crusts I would start talking nonsense :-) You know what I mean anyway.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST, topsie
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 09:20 AM

If you swallow an apple pip a tree will grow in your tummy. Strangely, this may be founded in truth - there were reports of a man who chocked while eating raw peas and one of them ended up in his lungs, where the moisture and warmth caused it to sprout and it started to grow.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST, topsie
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 09:26 AM

Regarding underwear and buses, I was told that you must wear clean underwear because you might get run over by a bus. The idea was that you would be dressed respectably when you arrived at the hospital or morgue. In fact, the chances of your underwear still being clean after the accident are not great.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST,#
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 09:33 AM

Anything to do with spinach and Popeye the feckin' sailor man.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 09:46 AM

Never swallow chewing gum because it'll get wound round your spindle.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Mrrzy
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 11:13 AM

My 3 older sisters, 5, 6 and 7 when I was born, had heard somewhere that one out of 5 children born is Chinese (this was the early '60s), so they wanted our parents to have another child after me so it would be Chinese.

I, on the other hand, never believed anything. There were way too many unbelievable things in fairy tales and big sister's stories, so (as a musical instance) when I moved to Virginia and saw Lynchburg and Danville on a map I was astounded, having assumed that since the mighty rough road between them was from a train wreck song that they were legendary places, not real.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 11:28 AM

"You should always mash bananas first rather than just eating them, as they will give you tummy-ache"()

It's well known that bananas disappeared from the UK during WW2, and when they reappeared after the war a lot of children had never seen one before. There was even a rumour that a child had died after eating a banana!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Rapparee
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 12:46 PM

1. If you swallow a watermelon seed you'll get pregnant -- just look at Aunt Helen!

2. There is a tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean which connects (our town in west-central Illinois) with the Vatican. The Swiss Guards are going to invade the US by using it.

3. If there's ever an Atomic War our town will be one of the first attacked because of our railroad hub and the dam on the river.

4. Smoking stunts your growth.

5. Drinking coffee stunts your growth.

6. Drinking beer stunts your growth.

7. People put gum on seats in movie theaters so that when you get up your clothes will be ripped off.

8. If you stand on a certain bridge in Hanover, Germany and look back between your legs you'll see a ghost. (I don't remember the bridge.)

9. They make hot dogs out of dead people.

10. If you cough, sneeze, and fart at the same time you'll explode.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST,michaelr
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 01:14 PM

If you make a weird face at noon, it will stay that way.

If you go "all the way" before you're married, you'll go blind.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Mr Red
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 01:32 PM

you mustn't eat bread or cakes when they are still hot from the oven because that would give you indigestion.

You better believe it. But only homemade bread, cooked in the old fashioned way.
Joy used to make her own bread, mix first thing in the morning, put near Rayburn (aka AGA) to prove, go to milk cows, come back, pop in Rayburn, have breakfast and it is cooked! She gave me a loaf one day and it was so good I polished it off in one day and a bit. If you wonder what I am bellyaching about, it was just that. Not indigestion per se, but very noticeable guts ache.

Now why don't we get it with commercial bread? These days? 1) it is never straight out of the oven 2) they use a lot more bicarb (&/or Amonium Bicarbonate because it acts quicker and is cheaper) to get the carbon dioxide (fluffiness) into the dough during baking, & save on proving time. 3) there is a lot more stuff in there, in the UK they used to add calcium (aka chalk) plus a load of vitamins required by law from WW2 legislation. Cornflakes ditto.

My friend told me that when an ambulance passed you should hold your collar tip - for how long I can't remember even if it was specified, probably to prevent the occupant dying! That lad became a vicar! Gawd bless him (and she did).

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Penny S.
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 01:50 PM

You could pick up thunderbolts in the Warren at Folkestone. This is an area of landslips from the chalk cliffs over clay.

I understood that thunderbolts were meteorites, and I assumed that if they were that common there, I should be able to see them landing, so I spent one evening looking out of my window towards the area in the hopes of spotting them.

Not having seen any, I decided that there was no reason why they should be attracted to the place.

What the things were, I was eventually told, were pyrites nodules from the Chalk. Later I was told they were marcasite. Anyway, they are hand sized balls of iron sulphide with radial gold coloured crystals inside a rusty exterior, some smooth, some lumpy.

They can also be found in the quarries east of Lewes.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 02:38 PM

When there's a full moon, low in the sky, it looks very big. However if you bend down and look at it between your legs it's normal size!

This may or may not be true but one thing is certain - you look pretty daft if you test it out!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Anne Lister
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 03:17 PM

The ambulance thing - we had to hold our collar until we saw a four legged animal, and that way we'd never ride in one.
We had to eat our crusts in order to have strong white hair and big curly teeth ... my mum knew all about the Rev. Spooner.
Avoid treading on the gaps between the paving stones and get downstairs before the upstairs loo stopped flushing to avoid all kinds of problems with monsters and snakes and stuff. I remember getting very confused in Eastbourne (where my grandparents were living) because their pavements looked like blocks of Dairy Milk with the raised chunky bits and that was where I saw my first ever black person. Apparently he was very amused when I told my mum he was chocolate too - I'm glad he saw the compliment I was intending it to be!
If you were naughty, you wouldn't get presents from Father Christmas. You'd get a bag of soot instead.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 04:01 PM

This is a true story. In my neighborhood there was a boy, Richard, who was odd. His speech was funny, and he had a cringing manner. One day on the playground, somebody told me "Richard eats baby food." Richard was probably 11 or 12 at the time.

After a while (after way too long a time) we learned that Richard was almost deaf. It was a shame that the cheap little school he went to hadn't spotted it years earlier.

If I had children or grandchildren, I would tell them this story to show them that some people say cruel and brainless things about those who are different or handicapped. I would say, "Ask yourself if that story makes any sense at all."

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: fat B****rd
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 04:10 PM

If I had too much salt on my meals my blood would dry up.
The lady two doors up had come home from hospital with a new baby because she'd broken her arm.
In Cleethorpes we used to hold our lapels if funeral cars went by.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 04:27 PM

There was a rhyme we used to sing about treading on the gaps between paving stones:

"If you tread on a nick
You'll marry a brick
And a beetle will come to your wedding"

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Bainbo
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 04:33 PM

Mike Harding: The Bogey Man

"My Gran told me that if I looked in the mirror
The Devil would come
And I'd have to run.
He'd chase me round
And he'd take me down
Far underground
And I'd never be found.
Then one day I looked in the mirror and the Devil he came in
But he looked just like the bloke what's courting our Maureen … "

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Bainbo
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 04:38 PM

"And me big brother told me if I trod on a nick
I'd be right thick
And I'd marry a brick
And to the wedding a beetle'd come
And sup up all the rum
And bugger up all the fun.
So for years I walked round
Staring at the ground
Til I smashed me head in on a lamppost
And was eight weeks coming round."

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 04:50 PM

From: GUEST
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 02:38 PM
When there's a full moon, low in the sky, it looks very big. However if you bend down and look at it between your legs it's normal size!
This may or may not be true but one thing is certain - you look pretty daft if you test it out!

True!
The moon close to the horizon appears bigger because you are comparing it to whatever else you can see, and because everything else (stars excepted) is closer, your sense of perspective makes the moon seem larger that it is when viewed in the middle of the sky (where it seems small and isolated).
Viewing it through your legs gives you an immediate & reliable sense of proportion, as your legs will be the same size whether you're viewing a moon near the horizon, or in clear space.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 06:09 PM

Brilliant stuff - Carry on folks :-)

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Paul Burke
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 06:51 PM

Dave- are you Bogbrush?

You can catch VD from brass doorknobs. My young sister had a violent row with Mum, mother defending the relative innocence of hardware. sister claiming scientific edge- "Aunty Sadie told me. and she's a nurse!"

I waited a few days, and left some educational leaflets next to my sister's bed when she was out. My mum thanked me for it years later.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST,Frank
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 08:48 PM

Looking at the Moon through your legs certainly gives a different perspective.
I quite often look at the stars in the Southern Hemisphere, and I find if you face South, bend over and look between your legs you can Uranus.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Rapparee
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 12:38 AM

Play with yourself and you'll go blind, have hair (sometimes green) on your palms, and/or your equipment would fall off "and shatter."

If you swallow your gum it will stay inside you and all the gum you swallow will eventually become a big ball of gum and block up your insides and you'll die. This happened to a kid down the street so it's true.

Don't drink Coke because if you put lunch meat in Coke and wait a few days the lunch meat will dissolve. (If Coke doesn't pass through you in a few days you've got bigger problems!)

Nuns were naked under their habits and were bald.

Saltpeter kills sexual desire and the Boy Scouts/Army/Navy/Boys' Schools put it in the mashed potatoes to prevent "problems."

A boy in a different grade looked at a dirty picture and went crazy. He's been locked away for years and years.

Kissing makes a girl pregnant.

Wearing yellow on Thursday (or other colors on other days) means you're a queer.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Ebbie
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 02:20 AM

Stop your dog eating grass- it can wrap itself around the dog's intestines, you know, causing great problems.

A friend from the Czech Republic told me that they were cautioned to avoid touching the dark end of a banana peel- that is where it is snake bit.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 02:37 AM

"If you were naughty, you wouldn't get presents from Father Christmas. You'd get a bag of soot instead."

A switch and two lumps of coal

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 05:01 AM

Never swallow chewing gum because it wraps around your "insides"

Never tread on the cracks in the pavement - no suggestion of what bad thing would happen, we just didn't do it.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Black belt caterpillar wrestler
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 05:21 AM

Drinking too much vinegar kills off your blood cells.

Someone must have had a bit of science know how to make that one up!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 05:46 AM

'Never tread on the cracks in the pavement - no suggestion of what bad thing would happen'
.,,.

Yes, there was where I came from: the bears would get you!

In A A Milne's poem 'Lines and Squares', from "When we were very young", the narrator talks of walking to avoid the bears

Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines in the street

≈M≈

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST,Desi C
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 06:27 AM

I'd almost forgotten, buy my Granny used to say I was born under a cabbage, my brother and sister under other garden growths! But She did make it sound funny and I don't think I ever actually believed it. Actually after we moved to England and aged a very naieve 14, a school mate told me where Babies really come from, I was so disgusted thinking he was being offensive about my Mum that I punched him one!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST, topsie
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 07:14 AM

Nigel Parsons
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 04:50 PM

From: GUEST
Date: 12 Nov 15 - 02:38 PM
"When there's a full moon, low in the sky, it looks very big. However if you bend down and look at it between your legs it's normal size!
This may or may not be true but one thing is certain - you look pretty daft if you test it out!

True!
The moon close to the horizon appears bigger because you are comparing it to whatever else you can see, and because everything else (stars excepted) is closer, your sense of perspective makes the moon seem larger that it is when viewed in the middle of the sky (where it seems small and isolated).
Viewing it through your legs gives you an immediate & reliable sense of proportion, as your legs will be the same size whether you're viewing a moon near the horizon, or in clear space."


THIS IS NOT TRUE

The moon (or sun) appears to be bigger close to the horizon because the image you are seeing is magnified by moisture in the atmosphere through which you see it. Sometimes, if there are strips of cloud in front of it, the magnification varies so that you see a dumb-bell shaped or egg-shaped moon or sun.
We had a discussion about it on mudcat some years ago:

Subject: RE: BS: Spring
From: GUEST, topsie
Date: 25 Feb 11 - 12:20 PM

"I'd never heard of the 'green flash' or 'green rim' before this thread, but the lowest picture in Micca's link [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_flash] seems to confirm something I have long suspected - the apparent size of the rising or setting sun or full moon when it is just above the horizon isn't just an illusion caused by its proximity to the trees and rooftops, as many 'experts' claim, but is caused by magnification when it is seen through the atmosphere near the horizon."

From: JohnInKansas
Date: 26 Feb 11 - 07:08 PM

"topsie (12:20 pm):

the apparent size of the rising or setting sun or full moon when it is just above the horizon isn't just an illusion caused by its proximity to the trees and rooftops, as many 'experts' claim, but is caused by magnification when it is seen through the atmosphere near the horizon."

The same magnification is responsible for what's called the "ephemeris jump" (you can look that up) noticed mostly for a setting sun or moon. The sun/moon appears to approach the horizon at "normal rate" until what looks like about the last 5 degrees (where it "should" take about 20 minutes more to reach the horizon) but "plops" out of sight in a minute or less. The effect is especially visible when seen from an airplane at 20 or 30 kft altitude.

John

If John in Kansas agreed with me I MUST be right.)

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Black belt caterpillar wrestler
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 11:27 AM

On occasions when I passed on a piece of dubious folk knowledge I had the reply "Having a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".

This left me thinking that having a lot of knowledge must be really dangerous.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Harmonium Hero
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 11:43 AM

What do curly-haired kids get told about eating crusts? Just wondered.
I used to be told not to pull faces because the wind would change and I'd stick like that. Never believed it though.
And knowlegeable friends at school claimed that masturbation made your thing bigger. It only occurred to me later in life that this activity coincides with puberty, during which your thing gets bigger anyway. Coincidence? Is there a female version of this myth? Just askin'.
JK

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 11:56 AM

Nice to see you, John. You must have eaten all your crusts to get that curly pig tail :-)

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST,crazy little woman
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 12:13 PM

combining coca cola and aspirin will kill you.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST,Anne Neilson
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 12:47 PM

Near Glasgow in the early 1950s we had a superstition about avoiding the cracks on the pavement (not at all PC) -- step on a crack and you'll marry a black man. (Goodness knows where this came from as our neighbours were all white families!)

My mother's siblings had emigrated to Africa in 1948, to Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia (as was) and to South Africa, and we were used to letters and information from those places as well as post-cards; and my mother told me that I saw some black men near the fountain in Kelvingrove Park, just beside the University of Glasgow, around 1950 and said, "Look, there are Africans!" -- seemingly they looked round and smiled before my mother's attempts to shoosh me could work…

We also had a firm promotion on eating up your crusts to achieve curly hair and eating carrots to sharpen your eyesight.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 12:59 PM

Ok, this is one of my very earliest memories...

Age 4 or 5, around the time I started infants school, I believed for a short time what other kids must have told me..
that the world was flat and rain happened as a consequence of god and the angels flushing their toilets.... 😬

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 01:08 PM

Not just as a child - I remember from my student days a tale that you could get drunk quicker (and hence more cheaply) if you drank beer through a straw rather than just out of the glass.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: Mr Red
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 01:24 PM

Saltpeter kills sexual desire is this a corruption of the army tactic of putting Bromide in tea for the same purpose? Myth or true our cadet week at Kimnel Park North Wales the tea did taste pretty vile. It was an all male teen affair in tents! I do remember being issued with rifles and blank cartridges some of which made their way home.

I never got the cartridges to fire by throwing bolders at them, but in defeat we (me & John Fiddler of "Medicine Head" fame) put a candle under the cap and nothing happened so we walked away. About a minute later we head a bang and a whistling into the distance over the canal. Thankfully it was open ground with no-one around.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 01:36 PM

the straw trick - yeah we did that with bottles of red wine when we were 14 or 15.

More stupidly aged 17, we believed the wise advice of older [early 20s] hippies we knew,
so became keen purchasers of benylin cough medicine and kaolin and morphine mixture...
Those dastardly hippies also convinced us to drink the most disgusting home brewed poppy tea..

There was also some other vile local natural plant infusion, but i can't remember what it was
[not mushroomz - they actually did work quite nicely]

I remember we puked quite a lot in our late teens thanks to our trusting the the hippy equivalent of old wives tales... 😣

Subject: RE: Folklore: Rumours you believed as a child
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 13 Nov 15 - 02:14 PM

"There was also some other vile local natural plant infusion, but i can't remember what it was"
might have been morning glory seeds...???

A quick google shows young folks are just as stupidly experimental...

But what to us 40 years ago was counter culture hippy folklore passed down by older wiser dungeons and dragons players..

is now an organized world wide 'legal high' capitalist industry... 😠