Tag Archives: silly

Jiggalo – Ritual

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Language: English

Ritual Dance: Jiggalo

Context: “Jiggalo is a dance I did with my high school volleyball team before every single match we played. It’s to kind of get the team hyped up and energetic for the game at the end of our warm-up. It also brings the team together as a sort of bonding thing. It starts with everyone separating off into grade levels, so the freshman, sophomores, juniors, and seniors all go off with their grade and get a few minutes to coordinate a dance. Once everyone is ready, we come back in a circle and sing ‘Our hands are high, our feet are low, and this is how we jiggalo,’ and then one at a time, each group does their little dance.

I first learned it in my freshman year at our first home game of the year, when the team captain said ‘Alright let’s go do jiggalo’ after we warmed up. The girls who had been there the year before taught me how to do it, but because I was the only freshman on the team, I had to do the actual dance alone which was kinda fun. They’re also the ones who told me that if we don’t do it, it’s basically an automatic loss, so the tradition was very important.”

Analysis: Not many people think about sports teams as folk groups, but they can definitely be considered as such. The main focus of sports is the athletic competition, and it’s clear why, but the communal aspect of it is often overlooked as a result. The entire world of sports is home to countless rituals that are only understood by the participants and/or fans of a select sport, and my informant’s description of jiggalo illustrates this perfectly. When she first said the word, my knee-jerk reaction was “what the hell is a jiggalo?” but that just proves my point. To me, it’s just a silly sounding word that could mean anything. To my informant and her team, it’s a sacred pre-game ritual that is important enough to where if they don’t do it, it immediately condemns the entire game. A common thread in folklore is the lack of understanding by outsiders, and while this pre-game ritual may not fit the traditional ideas of folklore, I believe it absolutely fits under the umbrella.

The Schnitzel Man – Legend

Nationality: American
Age: 28
Occupation: Author
Residence: Long Beach
Language: English

Text/Context: “In elementary school, there was a rumor making its way around about the Schnitzel Man. I first heard it from my friend Emily who heard it from another kid, and he was described as a tooth-fairy like figure who would bring Schnitzel to all the good little boys and girls. It started to catch on, and soon enough everyone knew about the Schnitzel Man. Some people believed it, including me and Emily, and we became so obsessed with the idea that we told everyone we knew, including our parents. Then one day, I woke up to get ready for school, and I feel something under my pillow. I pull it out, and lo and behold, it’s a plastic toy hot dog. I freak out and run to go tell my mom “The Schnitzel Man! He visited me in the night and left me a Schnitzel because I’m a good girl!” And so of course, immediately, the first thing I do when I find Emily at school is tell her, “I got a Schnitzel under my pillow, did you get one?” She said no, and I was like “I guess you’re not a good little girl then.” It became a source of irritation for her, because the Schnitzel Man never visited her, I was the only one blessed by the Schnitzel Man. I told everyone else in the friend group and anyone who didn’t believe before really started to believe then. In reality it was just my mother who wanted to play into all the fun we were having and wanted to pretend the Schnitzel Man was actually real.”

Analysis: I think we often forget how gullible we were as children, and this hilarious story is a prime example of that. If you told anyone over the age of 14 about the “Schnitzel Man,” they’d laugh in your face. But elementary schoolers will believe anything. This is reflected in the folklore that originates from this age group, as it is often much more far-fetched and absurd than the typical folklore you’ll hear. Kids see the world in what I would describe as a whimsical light, a product of their lack of experience. I sometimes yearn for that naivety, wishing I could once again believe in something like a Schnitzel Man or whatever other crazy things I used to believe in. It’s just so much fun. And although my informant is now too old to fall for such a story and knows the truth, it clearly made her happy to reminisce about it. It goes to show how folklore is not just a means used to preserve and pass down tradition, but as simply something to enjoy.

The Beef Lady – Legend

Nationality: American
Age: 56
Occupation: Physician
Residence: Los Angeles
Language: English

Text/Context: “When I was in church champ as a kid, there was the legend of the beef lady. The story went that there was an old lady living in the hills, and every once in a while someone would find the carcass of a dead cow that she killed and ate. I never saw any dead cows and neither did my friends, but sometimes someone would run over and say ‘I saw the beef lady I saw the beef lady! She’s right over there!’ and we would all go look. I went to this camp for 3, maybe 4 years, and every year, the beef lady was still a thing because the kids who were there the year before would tell the story to the first years. Even though there probably never was a beef lady, it was still fun to believe in. And you never know, maybe the beef lady was real all along and just really good at hiding her tracks.”

Analysis: A younger age group is naturally more inclined to believe in an entity as silly sounding as a beef lady who hides out in the woods. Frankly, kids will believe just about anything you tell them if you sound convincing enough. But what’s particularly interesting about the case of the beef lady is how it became so prominent at this church camp. I feel like of all the stories that could define a child’s experience at camp, the beef lady isn’t the one to do it. I think what made it so engaging for my father and his friends was the fact that it was specifically a church camp. These kids were raised very religiously, and the camp itself was so religiously based, that I think they wanted to believe in a story that was dark and scary, completely unlike the clean religious stories they were so used to.