Category Archives: Signs

Prognostications, fortune-telling, etc.

Find a Penny, Pick It Up and All Day You’ll Have Good Luck

Nationality: American, Ancestral: Scottish and Germanic
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Scotland
Performance Date: 04/27/2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Main Content:

M: Me I: Informant

I: It’s like Find a penny pick it up and all day you’ll have good luck. Is that like folklore?

M: Yup that’s good!

I: I did that constantly.

M: Now was that something that you learned from other kids or did that come from um your family?

I: Um definitely my family, my parents. They’d be like “Op, penny!” Sometimes my dad would drop pennies just so I could pick them up and have good luck. I loved it.

M: That’s so cute! Um is there, does the penny, I think I remember, the penny has be head up, right?

I: Oh there’s something like that, but I never cared *laughs*

M: *laughs*

I: Free money!

Context: This is something that she learned from her father. Everytime she sees a penny she still picks it up and feels as though it brings her luck. It also is a sweet reminder of her dad. This phrase though is very American in its ideals. Rhyming sayings like this are funny for people to learn/ regurgitate and lift spirits.

Analysis: Rhyming sayings, otherwise known as proverbs, like this are a good means of transferring ideas as the rhyming device makes it easy to remember and delivers the thought eloquently. I stated earlier that I thought that this speech was innately American and I even conferred with my Norwegian friend who agreed that while finding money on the ground is considered lucky- it’s considered lucky because you found money, not so much for any other purpose. Whereas with this saying, we have to recognize the focus on “free money!” And how reflective that is of the values of the United States. Traditionally the American view is that you work and struggle to earn your money and that is something that is difficult, but people that pride in that. Additionally, we know that this phrase goes beyond simply luck because they found money on the floor as the penny is relatively worthless and literally cost more to produce than its worth.

Peels for The Initials of Your Spouse

Nationality: American, Ancestral: Scottish and Germanic
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Scotland
Performance Date: 04/27/2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Main Content:

M: Me, I: Informant

I:OOOoooo, I don’t know if you want this but there’s a lot of um you know like when you are peeling potatoes, you throw the peel on the floor and it’ll name the initials of who you are going to marry

M: I did not know that

I: There’s a lot of them. That was a thing,  ugh again my grandma, I swear she is a crazy *laughs*. Or or apples if you are peeling anything, you do it in one peel as far as you can get, and if it breaks apart that’s just more letters for you and then you throw it on the floor and it’ll—-

M: Cool, cool!

Context: She learned this growing up cooking with her grandma, who is old fashioned. This was a practice she really enjoyed even if the answer changed from time to time but was also a bit nerve racking. The context brings an added element here as this practice is done in the kitchen, traditionally a place that is deemed for women. Thus this practice is much more used amongst the women.

Analysis: This practice definitely is more geared towards women as I said in the context piece because of where it takes place, but if we dig deeper and see how it reflects the portrayal of women and how while they cook in the kitchen, they wish for their future husbands; it comes across to directly chain domesticity to females and further pushes the age old view that a woman wants to get married and looks forward to finding herself a spouse. Through this way, the older and wiser women encourage the younger and more naive girls to be excited for their domesticity. Especially because of the prevalence of fruits in this practice, which in folklore tends to represent the fertility and virginity of a woman, which is often linked to their marriage.

Howling Dogs

Nationality: Peruvian, American
Age: 55
Occupation: Retired
Residence: USA
Performance Date: 04/29/2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Main Content:

M: Me, I: Informant

I: When I was younger, growing up my mother would say if you heard a dog howling at night, it was the soul of someone who was about to pass away or die or crossing to the next world. So, howling dogs at night used to scare me

M: Oh it used to scare you. Ok

I: Yes because it meant that someone was going to died and you didn’t know who

M: Oh gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. So you believed it to be true?

I: Well yeah I was little, like 7 or 8.

M: Do you believe it to be true today?

I: No, but there things in our family from Peru because we’re from you know that more of the rural areas, that there’s the belief in signs

Context: This was taught to my informant and the rest of her siblings when she was a small child. They all believed in this and even believe their mother had a ‘sense’ about these things. Her mother heard a basketball bouncing in the middle of the night (a symbol connected to the neighbors) and a dog howling and she claimed that someone in that household would die. Soon after the mother of the neighbors died of a surprise brain aneurysm. Seeing the folklore working in real time help to solidify in their belief of the howling dog as a premonition for a soon approaching death.

Analysis: In Peruvian culture especially in the more rural areas, there is a large focus and trust in omens. The belief is that the dogs have a sense about death and illness that humans don’t and thus they know when death is coming sooner than humans do. I think that allowing animals, dogs in this case, to have the power to sense what is coming allows for humans to conceptualize these deaths as a part of nature, a part of the life cycle, and that this was what was in the plans. It makes it easier to attribute to nature’s timing when ‘nature,’ aka dogs, is involved and know what is coming in advance- there is nothing to do but allow for life to take its course. Additionally, ‘seeing’ this work in real life with their neighbors, help to cement this belief in my informant when she was growing up, even if she doesn’t believe it as much now, possibly because she is in a much more science-valued country(the US).

Do Ghosts Moonwalk?

Nationality: Indian
Age: 67
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Mumbai, India
Performance Date: 28/04/2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

The Interviewer will be referred to as ‘I’, and the informant as ‘N’. Explanations and translations for Hindi words will be italicised and in parentheses. The Informant is a 67-year-old Punjabi father, raised primarily in Gujarat.

N: Ghosts stay on imli (tamarind) trees. Okay? So, you never walk close to a tamarind tree, late in the night. And, also, if the ghosts follow you, they walk backwards, they don’t walk front-wards. So you have to keep that in mind, and avoid tamarind trees. Or, they stay on… vadh (banyan), what is… banyan trees. They stay on banyan trees, because banyan trees are very old trees, you know how they expand their roots. They spread, so they are large. So, if you have to sleep in the open, especially in the night, never sleep under a banyan tree, or a tamarind tree, because they both have ghosts. 

I: What do you mean by them walking backward? They don’t face you?

N: No, it’s like their feet are… like, like our feet are facing forward, a ghost’s feet are generally supposed to be facing backward. So, a ghost’s face is here [he gestures to his own, where it would face normally, forward], but the feet are the other way around. So, in the night when you go out, if you feel scared of somebody, you have to check. Check, are their feet facing forward or backward. That’s what it means. 

Analysis:

I think this is an especially interesting belief, because I’ve heard it many times — ghosts live under tamarind trees, mango trees, banyan trees, an assortment of trees, depending on who you ask, but their feet always face backwards. I think this could partially come from the fact that sleeping under a tree at night is inadvisable because of the whole taking-oxygen-giving-CO2 thing, because it would make people feel weaker. At the same time, for the feet-facing-backwards thing, I think it is extremely common to imagine ghosts are human-like but still different from us, somehow grotesque, somehow wrong. Their feet facing backward and head facing forward is, in itself, a weird image to have, it feels intrinsically wrong, ‘freaky’, because it has that almost uncanny valley effect about it, close enough to human, human-like, but still different enough in both status (ghost) and appearance (feet), to be weird, uncanny, scary.

If the clasp is close to the necklace pendant – Arabic Children’s Folk Belief

Nationality: Jordanian
Age: 47
Occupation: Architectural Drafter
Residence: Long Beach
Performance Date: 5/1/2021
Primary Language: Arabic
Language: English, French

Context:

She was in an all-girls middle school in Jordan, and learned about this from other schoolgirls. She thought that this was silly, and did not pay much mind to it.

Belief:

“Young teenage girls used to think that if the clasp of the necklace is all the way down by the pendant, that means that someone is thinking of them.”

Thoughts:

I’ve never heard a belief like this before, so I was very intrigued by it. Although it is primarily children’s folklore, it does not nicely fit within parody, nonsense, or secrecy.* I do remember how much people generally liked being part of a group, and not an outcast, when I was in middle school; believing that somebody is thinking of you when your necklace clasp slides to the pendant could make you feel remembered, and not a forgotten face.

*Jay Mechling. “Children’s Folklore.” Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, edited by E. Oring, 91-120. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1986.