A Summary of “How Urban Legends Work” Have you ever heard of the urban legend “Bloody Mary”‚ where you stand in the bathroom with the lights off and the room completely dark and chant “Bloody Mary” 13 times in the mirror a woman will appear and kill you. In the article of “How Urban Legends Work” by Tom Harris‚ Mr. Harris gives us various examples of different urban legends. Exactly what is an Urban Legend? Urban legends are popular stories that are alleged to be true and are passed from person
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How Urban Legends Work In this essay the author Tom Harris tells us how urban legends effects us on how we live‚ the stories that are told can either give us a lesson to be learned or it gives us a warning‚ some stories can be horrific as in the story about the traveling sales man who met a women in Las Vegas and had a few too many drinks and had be drugged and had his kidney removed by a body organ harvesting gang and woke up in a bathroom tube covered in ice and a note to call for help before
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Name: Fabio Carvalho How Urban Legends Work BY Tom Harris (Summary) Tom Harris has come up with a number of definitions for urban legend. To me‚ a legend must be a story‚ with characters and some sort of plot. Others lump widely dispersed misinformation into the urban-legend category. For example‚ the erroneous belief that you will automatically pass all of your college courses in a semester if your roommate kills himself is generally considered to be an urban legend. While these "facts"
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Summary of: How Urban Myths Reveal Society’s Fears By Neal Gabler Urban Legends; secondhand stories about something horrific‚ iconic‚ or even magical‚ that are told to us in a way that makes them very believable‚ even though the contents of the stories may not truly be backed with any tangible proof. Urban legends tend to capture our imaginations. In his essay‚ which was first published in the Los Angeles Times in 1995‚ Neal Gabler presents the question as to “why are we so willing to believe
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Jordan Groll American Society: Urban Legends in the Classroom What is it about America that causes students and people to crave an education? Could it be the intense pressures of society‚ or could it even be the simple fact that we want to educate ourselves? For centuries people were fine with being un-educated and life was simple and laid back‚ but when John Cotton (a noted Puritan Minister) established the first public school in America‚ people began to eat it up. And thus was
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Gravity Hills: Urban Legend Urban Legends are stories‚ usually false or exaggerated‚ that are repeatedly told and embellished over time until they are believed to be true. Gravity Hills is known to be an urban legend and it is also surrounded by scary stories. It’s said that in various hills of California‚ if a car is parked on neutral it will somehow roll up the slope of the nearby hill. There have been stories due to this belief that children died in the hills as they helped push their school
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Urban Legends In this paper I will explain exactly what an urban legend is‚and give some examples of very popular ones that have been passed by word of mouth for decades across the United States. 1 " An urban legend is a story that is so bizarre‚horrifying‚or unexplainable‚ that it makes something inside of us want to believe it." Urban Legends can have traced origins from other countries‚ universities
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Urban legends have long been included in our culture as traditional stories that often provide a moral conclusion cultivated and spread either orally or written on paper. Many of these tales are often misunderstood as a false story‚ however these tales are derived from real life events‚ and are exaggerated and modified as time passes. Urban legends commonly reflect the fears of a society and often include warnings that prevent a certain action or else something unfortunate will happen to the person
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“Urban Legend” by James M. Henslin is about moral lessons that can be learned from the stories people have passed on throughout the years. James M. Henslin’s essay talks about how there are hidden messages within these stories in which he considers them to be “morality stories” or stories that are intended to teach a lesson. He goes on to talk about how some of the stories share common lessons while each one teaches its own. Some people wouldn’t realize this just by reading the story by itself which
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According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary‚ an urban legend is “an often lurid story or anecdote that is based on hearsay and widely circulated as true.” Urban legends tend to have minimal evidence of where the story originally began making them seem more mysterious and eerie. With this being said a legends background can be assumed to be linked with a multitude of instances. This‚ of course‚ what makes it an urban legend. If a urban legend does not contain a some sort of mystery then it would
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