To Believe or Not to Believe, Modern Urban Legends Essay -- essays re

To recollect or Not To BelieveModern urban Legends     Many people have heard the boloney of the dotty grandm new(prenominal) who tried to dry off her damp poodle dog by placing it in the microwave oven. The dog exploded, sad to say the least , and Grandma has never been quite the same since. The chronicle is not squargon it is an urban falsehood, circulating by word of mouth since the 1970s (Brunvand, 108). urban novels are popular stories alleged to be true and transmitted from soulfulness to person by oral or written communication. Legends tend to snarf spontaneously and are rarely traceable to a single signalize of origin. They spread primarily from individual to individual through various communication, and notwithstanding in atypical cases through mass media or other institutional kernel. Every culture has its folktales, including modern America. However, instead of involving gods and goddesses or princes and princesses, modern societys legends adopt "some guy my sisters best friend knows" or "someone who woke up in a motel room." They happened, supposedly, to real people, usually recently, in a occurrence place. They touch the most sensitive nerves of human minds with ironic twists, gross-out shocks, and moral lessons learned the hard port. However, the most remarkable thing about these stories is that so many people believe them and pass them on. Why does an audience entertain the storytellers word at face value, instead of recognizing it as an urban legend? The most obvious reasons as to why this happens are how the story is told to an individual, the birth between the teller and the listener, and in the case of horror legends, the fear invoked through the moral of the story.     There are many particular elements of an urban legend that play an enormous role in how it is interpreted by the public. They are usually characterized by a combination of humor, horror or a warning. The two types of urban legends are cautionary, usually having a moral to the story or a warning to stay "safe", and non-cautionary, which have no cautionary or moral element at all (Harris, 1). The lucubrate or beef of these legends are the primary factors that make them so believable. A severe example is the "Alligators in the Sewer" legend. The setting of this legend is usually a large city, in which a reptile-loving fanatic de... ... of a legend, and the details propose a vivid image for the mind to weave. Like numerous other cultures in history, the modern human is searching for answers to questions. However, these questions cannot be answered by the means that exist in the twenty-first century, so they return to the intellectual way of explaining events through their own perception, which are then created into stories and later evolve into legends and myths. Urban legends hold a significant place within the worlds cultures, dating pricker to time beyond rememb ering, and are likely to be told and believed well into the future.References     Brown, Yorick. The calciferol Best Urban Legends Ever juvenile York City I Books, 2003.     Brunvard, Jan Harold. besides Good to Be True The Colossal Book of UrbanLegends. New York W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. 180, 240-249.     Harris, Tom. Howstuffworks How Urban Legends Work. 2001. 1 Mar. 2004..     Roeper, Richard. Urban Legends The Truth Behind All Those lusciouslyEntertaining Myths That Are Absolutely, Positively, 100% Not True. New YorkCity race P, 1999. 179-182.