Folk Wisdom from Your Childhood

[Sophia C]

Wishing on found eyelashes.

Amusingly, it never occurred to me that this is a folk custom. It's just something that you have to do. :

[Nyktipolos]

Amusingly, it never occurred to me that this is a folk custom. It's just something that you have to do. :

 
Me either! It totally slipped my mind and didn't even think of it until it was posted about here, but I totally do this all the time, same with my partner.

[SunflowerP]

Me either! It totally slipped my mind and didn't even think of it until it was posted about here, but I totally do this all the time, same with my partner.

 
This is a sidestreet from the thread's main topic, but I think worth noting out loud: This is how 'but I don't have a culture' works.

Sunflower

[Jake57]

This is a sidestreet from the thread's main topic, but I think worth noting out loud: This is how 'but I don't have a culture' works.

Sunflower

 
If you are at dinner and someone drops a fork on the floor, someone is going to knock on the door and they'll be hungry!  Dropping a knife on the floor means an argument is going to occur.

If you dream of birds, someone is going to die.  Also, if you dream of the dead, someone living is trying to get in touch with you.

Whatever happens twice, happens three times, especially a death.

[dionysiandame]

This is a sidestreet from the thread's main topic, but I think worth noting out loud: This is how 'but I don't have a culture' works.

Sunflower

I'm not trying to be difficult I swear but I don't get this statement. Are you saying the "but I don't have a culture" phenom comes from the culture being so ingrained it's not even thought about? I mean I certainly heard about the wishing on an eyelash thing growing up but I never would have thought to consider it something "cultural." And then, what culture would it be?

[beachglass]

I'm not trying to be difficult I swear but I don't get this statement. Are you saying the "but I don't have a culture" phenom comes from the culture being so ingrained it's not even thought about? I mean I certainly heard about the wishing on an eyelash thing growing up but I never would have thought to consider it something "cultural." And then, what culture would it be?

 
That's the idea, that one often doesn't realize that something they think or do is a product of their culture and not just a fact or natural action. This American culture test is a neat look at this, though it doesn't really cover folk wisdoms or superstitions, and it paints with a rather broad brush.

From the responses in this thread, I'm guessing the eyelash thing is part of general Western English-speaking culture, but it could be broader or narrower than that.

[SunflowerP]

That's the idea, that one often doesn't realize that something they think or do is a product of their culture and not just a fact or natural action. This American culture test is a neat look at this, though it doesn't really cover folk wisdoms or superstitions, and it paints with a rather broad brush.

From the responses in this thread, I'm guessing the eyelash thing is part of general Western English-speaking culture, but it could be broader or narrower than that.

 
Yes, exactly - the sort of thing one just takes for granted as how things are, unless something calls one's attention to it, and even then, one doesn't necessarily recognize the implications. Fish don't notice water - and when a deficit of water and a surplus of air makes them notice, they still see it as, 'absence of the normative,' rather than, 'hey, there are environments that are different from the one I'm used to.'

As it happens, I've never even heard of the eyelash thing before now (and have no idea if it's absent in my geographic culture, or just from my family culture) - this is probably not irrelevant to why I was the one who made the connection with the 'don't have a culture' thing.

To answer DionysianDame's closing question, 'And then, what culture would it be?': I think that, too, is part of the problem; we think of culture in terms of what culture-box something goes in, and assume everything has a box. Many things do, it's true - but it's not always that tidy, because human beings so readily pick culturebits up from each other. Even when culture can be associated with an identifiable group, it's not discrete or pure.

Sunflower