Informant Data:

The informant is a 19-year old American student who was born in Santa Monica, California in 1996. She’s lived in Los Angeles County all her life with the exception of when she lived in Paris between late August 2014 to mid-December 2014. Her father’s ancestry is American as far as back as the founding of the Plymouth Colony in 1621 (but before that, the family is originally from England), and her mother’s ancestry is Romanian. She is a freshman at the University of Southern California and thus currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Contextual Data:

Over lunch, I was talking to my informant about her experiences in Europe for the first semester of the school year. My informant eventually began talking about how over Thanksgiving break she visited family in Romania. She eventually told me about some folk speech she kept hearing when she was visiting her Romanian cousins’ house.

Item:

“It’s this belief that a wind can cause…so much bodily harm to a person and like kill them…so they would blame everything on the wind. I mean, they’re like ‘don’t do this because the wind will come’ or ‘don’t walk around barefoot because the wind will come.’”

Analysis:

This folk speech seems like it’s just another way for adults who want to tell their kids to not do certain things and want their kids to listen to them. The reason they might specifically say not to do something “because the wind will come” may perhaps be because Romania is known for having very cold winters, and so the idea the wind will come if a kid does something bad is truly a scary, ominous message in that society.