Question: What is an urban legend?
Most people have heard the tale, usually imparted as a thing that "really happened to a friend of a friend," of the dotty grandma who tried to dry her damp poodle in the microwave oven. The dog exploded, sad to say, and Grandma has never been quite the same since.
The story probably isn't true, of course; it's an urban legend, spreading via word of mouth since the 1970s. It conveys a familiar moral -- new technologies, albeit a boon to humanity, can also be dangerous if misused. It's the kind of mishap that could conceivably happen, but we have no real evidence, nor any convincing reason to believe, that it ever has.
Answer: An urban legend is an apocryphal, secondhand story told as true, plausible enough to be believed, and likely to be framed as a cautionary tale, about some horrific, embarrassing, ironic, or exasperating series of events that supposedly happened to a real person.
Factual or not, an urban legend is meant to be believed. In lieu of proof, the teller of an urban legend is apt to rely on skillful storytelling and reference to putatively trustworthy sources -- e.g., "it really happened to my hairdresser's brother's best friend" -- to convince the listener of its veracity.
Urban legends are a type of folklore, which in turn comprises the beliefs, stories and traditions of ordinary people ("the folk"). One way to differentiate between urban legends and other forms of narrative (popular fiction or news stories, for example) is to compare where they come from and how they spread. Urban legends tend to emerge spontaneously and can rarely be traced to a particular author or point of origin. They are disseminated primarily through interpersonal communication -- from individual to individual -- and only in atypical cases via mass media or other institutional means. They tend to change over time through repetition, hence no two versions are ever exactly alike; there can be as many variants as there are tellers of the tale.
The phrase "urban legend" entered the popular lexicon in the early 1980s with the publication of folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand's first book on the subject, The Vanishing Hitchhiker (W.W. Norton: 1981). Though it has become synonymous in common parlance with "false belief," the term is intended to denote a more complex and subtle social phenomenon pertaining to the production and transmission of folk narratives — narratives which are indeed usually false, but which also, on occasion, turn out to be true.
Common characteristics
Accordingly, a given urban legend will typically exhibit most or all of the following characteristics:
- It is a narrative.
- It is alleged to be true.
- Its veracity is unproven.
- It is plausible enough to be believed.
- It is of spontaneous (or, at any rate, indeterminate) origin.
- It varies in the telling.
- It is likely to take the form of a cautionary tale.
- It is attributed to putatively trustworthy secondhand sources (e.g., "a friend of a friend," "my sister's accountant," etc.).
- It is transmitted from individual to individual, either orally or in written form (e.g., via fax, photocopy or email).
Further reading:
Examples of common urban legends:
- The Choking Doberman
- The Boyfriend's Death
- The Fatal Hairdo
- The Hook
- Humans Can Lick, Too
- The Killer in the Backseat
- The Microwaved Pet
