Concept
Urban legend
Overview
An urban legend (sometimes modern legend, urban myth, or simply legend) is a form of folklore consisting of unusual, humorous, or frightening stories that circulate as true accounts but are typically unverified or apocryphal. These narratives are often shared through word of mouth, social media, or news-like sources and typically involve shocking, mysterious, or cautionary themes.
These legends can be entertaining but often concern mysterious and troubling events, such as disappearances and strange objects or entities. Urban legends may confirm moral standards, reflect prejudices, or be a way to make sense of societal anxieties.
In the past, urban legends were most often circulated orally, at gatherings and around the campfire for instance. Now, they can be spread by any media, including newspapers, mobile news apps, e-mail, and most often, social media. Some urban legends have passed through the years/decades with only minor changes, in where the time period takes place. Generic urban legends are often altered to suit regional variations, but the lesson or moral generally remains the same.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The most universal of the forms in which this difference of method is accustomed to present itself, is the ancient feud between what is called theory, and what is called practice or experience. There are, on social and political questions, two kinds of reasoners: there is one portion who term themselves practical men, and call the others theorists; a title which the latter do not reject, though they by no means…
John Stuart Mill, Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
States what Urban legend is.
All this is understood when we utter the word man, by any one to whom the meaning of the word is known. Now, when we say, Man is mortal, we mean that wherever these various physical and mental phenomena are all found, there we have assurance that the other physical and mental phenomenon, called death, will not fail to…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
States what Urban legend is.
This is why it is so difficult to find out their former life from lunatics when they enter an asylum. The true and the false are always mixed up in their memory. Although the immediate present is correctly known, it becomes falsified through its fictitious connection with an imaginary past; they therefore regard themselves and others as identical with persons who exist only in their imaginary past; they do not…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
States what Urban legend is.
Related ideas
- Folklore
- Internet
- Michigan
- The Guardian
- Nazi Germany
- Worldview
- Myth
- Social science
- Scientific method
- World War II
- United States
- Legend
- Supernatural
- Moral
- Usenet
- Bigfoot
Place in the tradition
Part of Fundamentalism.