The informant shares his Uncle’s proverb:
“It’s not about how you feel, it’s about how you look, and you look marvelous”
This is a saying my informant’s uncle uses whenever someone is complaining around him. It’s a funny way to tell the person to stop complaining while also making light of the situation and turning it around to a positive thing at the same time, effectively disseminating tension and providing a laugh.
Did you ever think when a hearse goes by, that some day you are gonna die?
They’ll wrap you up in a big white sheet and throw you down about 500 feet.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play peaknuckle on your snout.
And after a while, the snot comes out, and you spread it on bread, cuz that’s what you eat, when you’re dead!
My informant remembered this song, which she described as “a classic, grim piece of oral tradition,” and said that it brought back a lot of memories from her childhood. When she was little, the informant’s mother would sing this song whenever they passed a hearse, and the informant said it was always a very visceral for her, and that ‘the part about the snot coming out and eating it really disgusted me’. She learned it from her mom, and she thinks her grandfather used to sing it, because her mother said that it reminded her of her dad whenever a hearse drove by.
As my informant stated, this song is a ‘classic, grim piece of oral tradition,’ but also a particularly interesting one. Not only is it a song sung in America that openly addresses mortality and the fact that death is inevitable, but the intended audience is children. America is one of the countries that shuns, fears, and stigmatizes death the most—possibly why horror movies are one of the topmost grossing genres of film in the US—so it’s interesting that this song is a non-romanticized and very explicit recounting of what happens when you die (no heaven or angels here). Further, the lyrics and the major key of the song makes light of death altogether, making jovial and silly what Americans consider one of the most sorrowful and somber occasions ever. What else is interesting about this song, which coincides with the lyrics and the major key, is that the song is targeted for children. The song, which sounds very much like a camp song children would sing to laugh and gross each other out about a particularly macabre subject, could have been used as a fun and entertaining way to let children participate in something seemingly transgressive while also familiarizing them with the concept of death.
The informant tells the story of the Tommyknockers in his town
My informant, who comes from a small mining town in Colorado, says that everybody in his town knows about the Tommyknockers and the mining tunnels. However, he does note that they are indigenous to Idaho Springs, because nowhere else he’s gone has he heard about Tommyknockers, and even people down in Denver don’t know about these creatures and their interactions with the miners.
The story of the Tommyknockers is interesting and rife with cultural history. Most of the people of Idaho Springs either work or have parents who worked in the mines and quarries, which is one reason why the legend of the Tommyknockers is still so well known in the immediate community. These little creatures are of particular importance because of their interesting relationship with the miners of the town. Mining is a very laborious and dangerous job often held by less educated working-class citizens. With these two aspects compounded, it makes sense that the belief in and acceptance of these sprites is so widespread, because Tommyknockers can either lead a miner to a wealth of gold, or to their death, but the miner has no way of knowing one way or another. In this way, Tommyknockers mirror the way the miners live every day down in the mines: they might leave the mines a rich man, or not leave them at all.
Tommyknockers are similar to the leprechauns and other earth spirits in Celtic and English lore in appearance as well as in their defining characteristics. Just like traditional Celtic earth spirits, Tommyknockers are mysterious, dwarfy/leprechaun-type looking wily creatures that can either help or harm the miners in the tunnels of the mines. Not surprisingly, most of the miners in the mining town are of Irish decent, which makes sense why there Tommyknockers are in such close similarity with Irish sí and Celtic earth spirits.
Not only are Tommyknockers very demographic-specific, they are also incredibly location specific. Performing a piece of folklore about—in fact even knowing about—Tommyknockers immediately ties the person to Idaho Springs. And Idaho Springs has taken on Tommyknockers as a sort of town mascot, much like the Irish have done with the leprechaun. Not only do Tommyknockers bring a sense of community to the town with the lore surrounding the mines in which many work, but they also exist outside the realm of work: the town bar is called Tommyknocker Brewery & Pub and features a friendly, miner helmet-wearing Tommyknocker on both its awning and on the bottles of Tommyknocker beer that they brew, showing that the Tommyknocker has been adopted as a sort of mascot of the town, representing the town’s spirit as well as its past.
‘My family’s religion is called the Bahai faith, and most persians celebrate what is called Nowruz, which is the Persian New Year, and that’s in the beginning of March. And what you do, it’s a big tradition where you set up these seven plates on a table to celebrate the new year, and it’s called Haft Sin. And the seven items you put on the dishes are sabzeh, which is wheat or barley or lentil, samanu, which is sweet pudding, senjed, dried fruit, sir, garlic, sib, apple slices, somaq, berries, and serkeh, which is vinegar and you put that in a cup. But with the sabzeh, what you do is, they’re usually lentils, and you put them on a dish, and then you put a damp towel over the dish, and then over a series of ten days the sprouts will grow, and it’s this fun thing that you can see every morning as they grow. And Haft is seven, and sin is the letter ‘s’, so it’s called the seven S’s.
Haft Sin is an integral part of Nowruz, the Persian New Year holiday that is celebrated on the vernal equinox. The celebration represents the new life that awaits them in the year to come, as well as the rejuvenation of nature around them. Each of the seven items laid out for Haft Sin has it’s own particular symbolic meaning. Sabzeh, the plate of grains that sprout represents purity, opulence, and good fortune, as well as rejuvenation and growth; samanu, which is sweet and a favorite of kids, represents fertility and bearing many children; senjed represents love; sir, the garlic, is the medicine for recovering from evil; the apple slices, or sib represent health and natural beauty; the color of the berries of the somaq symbolizes the sun at sunrise, awaiting a new day; and serkeh symbolizes age and patience, and wards off the bitterness that comes with old age. These seven items are very important because not only is seven a very mystical number in Iran, there is one item for every day of the week, and one item that represents every stage in the human life cycle.
Citation:
http://www.iranchamber.com/culture/articles/norooz_haftseen_never_told.php
über geld spricht man nicht das hat man es
About money do not talk that has it
You don’t talk about money, you have money
My informant said that this proverb reflects the modesty surrounding talking about one’s wages in Austria.
This saying isn’t only reflective of the modesty of Austria, but is also emblematic of the whole of Europe’s being modest about one’s earnings and not talking about one’s wealth. Unlike in America, where the first thing out of someone’s lips when you tell them you have a job is, ‘how much do you make?,’ in Europe and many other countries in the world, it is incredibly uncouth and impolite to talk about what one earns, because that is a private matter, and should have no bearing on your relationship with that person. In fact, it’s normal for people to be friends without even knowing exactly what kind of work they do. So, this proverb works to show the culture’s separation between work and play, which doesn’t exist in America.