Author Archives: Melissa Mendes

Butter on your Burns

Nationality: Mexican- American
Age: 40
Occupation: House Mother
Residence: Harbor City, Ca
Performance Date: 4/21/2012
Primary Language: English

My informant told me that an oft-used folk remedy that her mother used to use on her for burns was cold butter. According to my informant, Cold butter is thought help cool the burn and soothe the irritation, but is in reality a bad idea. The greasy substance could possibly cause infection and become a breeding ground for bacteria.

This was likely thought as a good idea because of its availability in the kitchen where many burns occur, and the cool substance no doubt would feel good against the irritated skin at first.

Peas in the Lungs

Nationality: Mexican- American
Age: 65
Occupation: Business Owner
Residence: Fullerton, Ca
Performance Date: 4/21/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“Okay so, this man was eating peas, and he accidentally inhaled one, and the pea grew in his lung because it was using the carbon dioxide and nutrients in his lung to get bigger. He went to the doctor’s and they x-rayed him and saw the plant growing. He went to the hospital and the doctor operated on him and took it out, then fed him pea soup as a joke.”

My informant heard this urban legend from his cousin. It’s a pretty blatant message that one should eat slowly and chew their food carefully. This narrative sounds remarkably like the watermelon-seed-in-the-stomach story, and my informant made it quite clear that he didn’t believe a word of the it. He said that his cousin isn’t known for being particularly believable. However, upon further research, it seems that this story is actually true!

An article from ABC news.com states that two years ago a man named Ron Sevden from Massachusetts had a pea go down the wrong pipe and lived with it for a month before going to the doctors, who had to surgically remove it. They even really fed him something with peas in it!

Reference: Blackburn, Bradley. Pea Sprout Removed From Massachusetts Man’s Lung. Aug 11, 2010.  http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2010/08/pea-sprout-removed-from-massachusetts-mans-lung/

“He who smelt it, dealt it”

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 65
Occupation: Business Owner
Residence: Fullerton, Ca
Performance Date: 4/26/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“He who smelt it, dealt it.”

This saying is a comment in response to an accusation that one has passed gas, and is more or less a way of saying that the accuser is the guilty one and only looking to place the blame on someone else to avoid the embarrassment of owning up to it. This phrase is usually used when in groups of three or more, and usually entails someone smelling a foul odor and calling the offender out on it. My informant said that one of his brothers told him this phrase when he was younger, as well as the follow-up phrase that “whoever denied it, supplied it.” It’s basically a way of humiliating each other and making light of a natural bodily function that is otherwise unseemly.

Theoretically it could be labeled as a proverb in that it implies that whoever brings up an unspoken problem is likely at fault for it, and the same can  be said for anyone who denies having caused the problem. However, to this collector’s knowlege it doesn’t usually come up outside of the specific situation of passing gas.

 Annotated: This saying was used as a joke with a double meaning in season 2, episode 16 of South Park, in which the protagonists were trying to find who was to blame for the recent trend of telemarketers taking advantage of elderly people by selling over-priced jewelry. The gold jewelry would be given to their relatives, who would sell it to the pawn shops, who would then smelt it down to be remade into new jewelry to be sold again. The joke was that the smelters were at fault for the entire scheme, hence “he who smelt it dealt it.”

Flour to Stop Bleeding

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 65
Occupation: Business Owner
Residence: Fullerton, Ca
Performance Date: 4/21/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

According to my informant who grew up on a farm in a poor family, in the old days mothers used to put baking flour on cuts as a folk remedy to stop bleeding. He heard this from one of his brothers, who actually told him that the remedy was a false one. This brother of his had cut his foot when he was younger, and his sister had put flour on it in an attempt to staunch the bleeding. The blood didn’t stop flowing.

Essentially, it was a poor person’s remedy. It may have gotten its reputation as a cure for bleeding due to its absorbency, but would never be very effective on anything larger than a paper cut as it doesn’t really have anything to do with blood coagulation.

Internet Predator

Nationality: Mexican- American
Age: 41
Occupation: Quality Assurance Manager
Residence: Harbor City, CA
Performance Date: 4/21/2012
Primary Language: English

“…Just remember there are a lot of fucking sickos and psychos and rapists and other terrible people that will say and do whatever they can to get you to meet up with them to hook up or do bad things to you or whatever. It worries me that you spend so much time on the internet. I heard just the other day from a guy at work that some guy was found dead in his apartment after he got some kid he had met through the internet to come over, and it just goes to show that you can’t trust anybody you meet like that. Not even if they aren’t old.”

My informant for this piece is a concerned father lecturing his daughter on the dangers of the internet. There are many tales circulating, many of them quite true, about internet predators that meet people throught the internet and do terrible things to them. This particular warning stands out in that it’s the younger party that’s the actual attacker. This may be a sort of comment on how it’s the younger generation who have a firm grip on today’s technology and maybe a subconcious fear of the young taking advantage of the old in a reverse of the usual “elderly man takes advantage of a young teen” story.

It’s certainly a vague story, but there is something threatening about the open-endedness of it.

Annotation: This particular story, though vague in detail, is brought to life in a chilling horror movie by the name of Hard Candy (2005), in which a 14 year old girl (Ellen Page, leading actress of Juno) turns the tables on a pedophile she met through the internet.