Author Archives: Harrison Roberts

Gambling: Winning a 50

Nationality: English, Irish, Scottish, Dutch
Age: 76
Occupation: N/A
Residence: Arkansas
Performance Date: 28 April 2021
Primary Language: English

Main Piece: GC’s father used to go and play dominoes and gamble on that. She said that she “always liked it because [her] daddy would give the 50 dollar bills to me,” because he was superstitious that winning a 50 dollar bill and keeping it was bad luck. GC said that her father would never keep or spend a 50 dollar bill he’d won gambling himself, he would always give it away. Whenever he won a 50, he would leave the game immediately so that his bad luck didn’t start during his next game.

When GC grew up and began going to casinos and gambling, she continued the superstition under the impression that it was bad luck. She’s never even “seen a 50 dollar bill in a casino, never, even on the slot machines. They’ll accept 5s, 10s, 20s, 100s, just not 50s.” She said that when she cashes out from a session, they’ll always pay a 50 with two 20s and a 10 rather than one bill. When she asked her husband, who also goes to casinos, if he’d ever kept a 50 dollar bill when he’d won one, she said he was shocked, almost offended. 

Context: This superstition applies to gambling either in a local community setting or a casino, when the winner of a pot gets a 50 dollar bill. GC is a 76 year old woman living in Arkansas. She goes to casinos with her husband semi-frequently.

Informant’s Thoughts: GC said that she would guess the tradition started due to the relative rarity of 50 dollar bills compared to other bills like a common 20 or 10. While she doesn’t know the origins of this superstition, this could be a reason why it started.

Archivist’s Thoughts: I think that this shows the common idea of gamblers being superstitious. So much of gambling relies on luck that it’s easy to formulate superstitions that attribute one’s bad luck to a misstep they made. Keeping a 50 dollar bill, because of their rarity, could have happened to precede a loss streak, and the tradition became so prevalent that even casinos couldn’t carry 50 dollar bills because it would lose them business.

Armenian Pre-Christmas Tradition

Nationality: Armenian
Age: N/A
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 8 February 2021
Primary Language: English

Context: Due to the sharing of culture between European nations, many traditions and holidays share seemingly universal themes. For example, Christmas traditions in European countries often have themes in common such as generosity, kindness, and teaching respect to children, even if the details of the traditions are different. The same concept applies to the Armenian Christmas tradition. 

Note: This logic applies strictly to modern European and Western traditions.

Main Piece: Armenian Christmas takes place on the 6th of January, and informant GG explained that the time from New Years (Jan 1) to Christmas was celebrated with a particular tradition. For the first six days of the new year, you can visit anybody in town throughout the day, and “everybody is expected to both have and be company. They set out huge tables, and there’s always food on it because they know that at any moment people could show up!” In many Western countries, Christmas is a time when extended family and friends are invited to eat and give gifts for the whole day, but the Armenian tradition extends far beyond that! GG said that, despite the stress of it, “they all love it, [even though] the wives are a little stressed because they’re always cooking…” to keep fresh food on the table at all times for the whole day! At that, all of this is simply leading up to Christmas itself! 

Thoughts: I think that this tradition is a wonderful example of folklore that encourages and strengthens bonds between people! As GG said it, “It’s like a giant party for 6 days,” and I believe that the reason why it’s practiced is because it’s fun! Regardless of the expense, stress, or waste it might incur, the whole concept of expecting everyone to both be and serve guests seems like a beautiful tradition. 

Armenian Wedding Money Dance

Nationality: Armenian
Age: N/A
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 8 February 2021
Primary Language: English

Context: Matrimony is a special liminal, or transitional, period in a person’s life. In some cultures it marks the transition from a woman being owned by her father to owned by her husband. In some it marks the beginning of a monetary relationship between two families, like a mutual advancement in social class. Regardless, for cultures that have a tradition about the liminal event of marriage, most often the tradition is in regards to future prosperity, success, or fertility. Here, informant GG explains the Armenian wedding traditions, shedding light on similarities between them and the western traditions.

Main Text: Transcript:

GG: Armenian weddings are known to be really over the top. Parents, relatives, family- they really spare no expense in going all out with like the food, the entertainment…  One tradition is that the bride and groom, they get together… and then people will gather around and they’ll throw stacks of money into the air. It’s just like a constant stream of people… usually it’s the males of the families, and they’ll come up and they throw like a hundred bucks worth of ones in the air and it’s like flowing down. They create a circle where they throw it from all these different angles, and it’s supposed to signify wealth and abundance at the start of the marriage, and it gets intense sometimes. There’ll be like piles of cash on the floor or like little kids running around trying to grab some. Some people need… big ‘ol brooms by the end to sweep all the money up. 

HR: That’s amazing, that sounds hilarious! [Laughs] So lots of western traditions have wedding gifts. Is that like in lieu of a wedding gift, people just instead walk up and throw wads of cash at the bride and groom?

GG: They still do give gifts, but they’re not as big as in the west.

I continued to speak with GG about this tradition and found that he’d been apart of many money dances at Armenian weddings, not as the thrower or the groom but as a kid, running in and trying to snag money for himself! 

Thoughts: I think that the nature of liminal periods includes some kind of uncertainty about the future. When one makes the transition from one stage in life to another, they often turn to traditions regarding luck or guidance. The transition from single to married carries plenty of uncertainty, so the Armenian Money Dance tradition is a way of wishing the newly-weds monetary luck in the coming years. 

Duduk Armenian Folk Instrument

Nationality: Armenian
Age: N/A
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 8 February 2021
Primary Language: English

Context: The duduk is an Armenian instrument originating some 3000 years ago. It is a wind instrument which was at one point made of bone, but now it’s made from wood. The Armenian Genocide took place from 1915 to 1923 and it included the targeted murder of around one million Armenians. Informant GG describes the duduk’s use and cultural significance.

Main Piece: Transcript:

GG: There’s usually two people playing [the duduk]. One plays a steady “dum” while the other plays on top. The interesting thing about it is how somber it sounds… It’s usually associated with sad things like the Armenian Genocide… if you see anything about that you’ll notice in the background that the Duduk is what’s being played.

—

The duduk is often played at live performances today, and as GG said, it’s somber sound can be associated closely with tragic events, such as the Armenian Genocide, or at funerals and community services. 

Thoughts: Music which accompanies a cultural aspect of society can often set the tone for how that culture is represented to its participants. Because Armenians have historically experienced such terrible events, the use of the duduk as a cultural instrument to display feelings of sadness can help non-Armenians understand the loss that the country and people saw with the Armenian Genocide. 

Gamer Culture: Pwned

Nationality: Armenian
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 8 February 2021
Primary Language: English

Context: When you’re playing competitive online games, one of the most important things to learn is how to most effectively show off to the enemy. You won’t always have the time to curse them out or otherwise eloquently explain your skill to them. For this reason, different kinds of slang have been adapted to meet the needs of competitive gamers. From this, we get the gamer slang “pwn.”

Main Piece: To “pwn” someone is to, essentially, annihilate them, destroy them, or otherwise completely defeat them when it wasn’t even close. Similar slang would be “curb-stomping” or “bitch slapping.” The gist is that gamers need more ways to tell people how bad they were beaten as a part of the psychological warfare of gaming. If somebody gets angry, or “tilts,” they’ll play worse, and if they’re angry enough, they might even quit! Pwning became the go-to affirmation of dominance in gaming lobbies for much of the mid-2000s because of both its simplicity and its meme status. Informant GG shares his account of his origins in Counter Strike, a competitive first person shooter game. 

Transcript:

GG: I first heard [pwned] (pronounced p-owned) in 2003; I was playing Counter Strike with my buddies, and one of them just goes “pwned!” and I said “what?” and he said “pistol owned!… so owned is like to dominate someone or to make someone your bitch using your skill, and pistol is like how we whipped out the pistol and shot a guy…” I don’t know the exact origins of it, but I’ve seen it everywhere from YouTube to memes, it’s all over the place.

Example of a meme using the term “pwned”, from KnowYourMeme.com

Thoughts: In gaming culture, defeating a rival is a moment of great pride that one may be too excited to put into eloquent words. It is for this reason that I believe “pwn” arose from a need to accurately describe the feeling of dominance over an opponent, regardless of it’s roots as either a keystroke error (because p is next to o on the QWERTY keyboard) or as a combination of pistol and own. From GG’s perspective it certainly makes sense that killing an opponent with your pistol, a relatively weak weapon compared to rifles and machine guns, would warrant pwning, but the folklore aspect of pwning is more through why people used it and less of how they began to use it. In the mid-2000s, pwned became apart of internet meme culture because of its applicability to other scenarios. Anytime that something goes catastrophically wrong for someone, they’ve been pwned (See Know Your Meme). Using the term pwn also includes you in apart of the culture of the internet. Therefore, I believe that people used pwned primarily because of its attached feelings of dominance as well as its inclusion in internet culture. 

Annotation: Pwned photo from Know Your Meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/owned-pwned