Biscuits – Dance

Phrase: calling sickling your feet “biscuits”

Alternate Phrase: Huckleberry Fin

Context: The informant, 21, white, grew up in Southern California, is a dancer, they explained that in dance: “there’s this thing that you can do with your feet, it’s called sickling your feet where like it’s basically like the opposite of pointing them, you know you point your feet and if you sickle them you like turn them like in toward like the inside of your feet and it’s really bad for you and it’s like a big no no in dance, like really big no no in dance. And it’s like it used to be a problem in like one of the dance teams I was on where like people would like get up from the floor and would like sickle their feet like as they were doing it, um my dance teacher used to call, she’d be like would be like telling us not to do it and she’d be like correcting us or whatever and she would call them “biscuits”? She was like don’t have biscuit feet.

Laughter

And to this day I don’t know what it means (laughter) or why they’re called biscuit feet but she was always like, I don’t want to see little biscuits out there don’t be doing that.”

Interviewer: “Have you heard anyone else use it?”

Informant: “Ummm I don’t know if I’ve heard anyone else use it. The other thing she used to call it was huckleberry fin. Like she would be like don’t be like little like huckleberry fin like when you’re gettin’ up and I did hear others dance teachers call it like, be like don’t be like huckleberry fin which I have no F*cking clue why that’s what that is. Isn’t that hilarious?

So now I say it to my dance students and like don’t be a huckleberry fin.”

Analysis: This is an example of specialized folk speech used to teach children about a specific part of dance. Ballet is a dance form that is difficult and requires dancers to start early, so it makes sense that phrases would evolve to help children remember certain elements. Sickling your feet is easy to do and requires training to learn to point your feet in the right way, the phrase “biscuits” naturally evocates a sense memory of taste, sight, and smell, making it easy to remember for children. It’s also cute and a little funny, potentially making the frustrating experience of learning a new skill easier for the young ones. 

The phrase Huckleberry fin is a little bit more up in the air. It may be a reference to the sickle sometimes used in farming, but according to the internet (I unfortunately have never read Huckleberry fin) a sickle is not a prominent tool in the story, I don’t even know if it is mentioned. But either way it is a fun way to teach an important concept to young children.

Fan Death

Text: “In Korea you cannot sleep with the fan on in a closed room. You will die. My mom would come into my room at night and turn the fan off, and if she found me sleeping with it on, she would wake me up and get mad.” IW explained that some say the fan creates a vacuum and you suffocate, some say it lowers your body temperature too much and you get hypothermia and die. The fans they sell in Korea come with a built-in timer for this reason.

Context: IO is a Korean American student whose parents are first-generation immigrants from Korea. She heard the belief from her mother growing up. Within South Korea the belief is widespread enough that mainstream Korean newspapers have historically reported “death by electric fan” as a cause of overnight death, that the Korean Consumer Protection Board has issued formal warnings. IO does not really believe the fan can kill her, but she will not sleep with one running and still uses one that features a timer. 

Analysis: Fan death is one of the cleanest cases of a modern technological folk belief. Electric fans are 20th-century technology, so the belief cannot be ancient, yet it has matured remarkably quickly. Already a namesake of parent-to-child transmission at bedtime, multiple proposed mechanisms (of death) that vary by account, and a thick web of social and material reinforcement, from newspaper death reports to government warnings to the physical timers built into the fans sold in Korea. 

Don’t Give an Umbrella as a Gift

Text: I had mentioned to KH that I had gotten someone an umbrella as a gift, and she stopped me. “You’re like not supposed to do that, right?” she said. The word for umbrella, 伞 (sǎn), sounds nearly identical to 散 (sàn), which means to scatter. To give someone an umbrella is to wish the two of you scattered, dispersed. There is a workaround: if the recipient gives the giver a coin, even a penny, in return, the umbrella becomes a transaction rather than a gift, and the negative implications no longer apply.

Context: Told to me by my friend KH, a Chinese American student, after I mentioned that I had bought an umbrella as a gift. She had heard the rule from her parents, who emigrated from China. The homophone pair is 伞 / 散: 伞 (sǎn, umbrella) and 散 (sàn, to scatter) differ only by tone. 

Analysis: This same homophonic logic shows up commonly in Chinese culture, where a linguistic sign is read as a small contagion that invokes the outcome it names. The umbrella case is a good example because the prohibition attaches to one ordinary household object and to one specific verb. An exchanged coin transforms the gift into a purchase, and the relabeling alone is held to neutralize the linguistic risk. It’s not always the case that these homophonic folklores have such convenient workarounds. The changing “gift” to “purchase” suffices to break the spell.

How the Chipmunk Got Its Stripes

Text: A chipmunk and a bear once had an argument. The bear was bragging that he was the strongest animal in the forest, and that he was so powerful he could stop the sun from rising. The chipmunk didn’t believe him. The bear stayed up all night telling the sun not to rise, but the sun came up anyway, as it always does. The chipmunk laughed and mocked the bear. The bear got angry and chased the chipmunk. The chipmunk dove into a hole at the base of a tree, but the bear caught its back with his claws just as it disappeared, leaving five long scratches. That is why all chipmunks have stripes today. 

Context: EL is a 22-year-old USC student originally from Maryland. She could not identify the specific source she had heard the tale from, only that it was encountered somewhere in childhood, as it took some effort to recall the entire story. 

Analysis: This is a classic tale whose function is to explain a natural phenomenon, in this case the chipmunk’s striping. The bear-and-chipmunk version is the most broadly disseminated version in American children’s literature. The tale’s structure is highly stable: large boastful animal versus small clever animal, the boast humiliated, the chase, the claw-marked stripes. The folkloric interest is in how a tale rooted in Indigenous oral tradition has been absorbed into a generic American children’s literature canon, where it now circulates among non-Indigenous children largely without sense of its origin. 

牛郎织女: The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd

Text: There was once a poor cowherd, Niulang (牛郎), who lived alone with an old ox. One day the ox spoke, telling him that seven heavenly maidens were coming down to bathe in the river, and that if he hid the youngest one’s robes, the Weaver Girl Zhinü (织女) would not be able to return to the sky and would become his wife. He did, and she did. They had two children and lived happily.

The Queen Mother of the West discovered that her granddaughter had married a mortal. She came down and pulled Zhinü back into the heavens. Niulang followed, with his two children carried in baskets on a shoulder pole. The old ox had told him before dying to wear its hide so he could fly. He came close. But the Queen Mother pulled out her hairpin and drew a line across the sky, and the line became a river of stars: the Milky Way. 

Niulang and Zhinü are now two stars on opposite banks of the river, unable to cross. Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, all the magpies in the world fly up to form a bridge across the heavenly river, and the two of them meet for one night. This has become China’s equivalent to Valentine’s Day. 

Context: Told to me by my mother, IW. She has told it to me in some form since I was small, sometimes as a bedtime story. The story even became a tool to teach me Chinese as I vividly remember reading it from a book of fairytales. For most of her life and for most of mine, the Milky Way that the story turns on has been invisible: we have always lived in areas too light-polluted for it. On a family vacation to Fiji several years ago, on a beach far from any artificial light, we saw the Milky Way clearly for the first time. It did look like a river. 

Analysis: ‘The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd’ is one of the four great Chinese folk tales, with attestations reaching back to the Han dynasty. It explains a visible celestial phenomenon (the Milky Way as a river, with Niulang as Altair and Zhinü as Vega on either side), supplies the etiology for the Qixi festival on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, and exists in clear regional variation across Han Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese traditions. IW’s telling is a standard northern Chinese version. What stays with me about hearing it for years and only later seeing the Milky Way clearly, on a Fijian beach, is that the myth was composed by people who could see the river every clear night. To stand under a sky where the river is visible was to recover the perceptual ground that produced the story. It was a powerful moment for us both.