Quote:
Originally Posted by encapuchado
Thanks for the link. I guess many of these things have an European origin and from there they jumped the pond to the new world.
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I think people would be surprised that a lot of the sayings they thought were just some family member's quirk are actually very old. There are collections of folklore that remind me of the books Barney Fife used to read when the Darlings were in town (for those of you who get
that reference.) Some time back I was doing google searches on old folklore and folk medicine from the area and found lots of things that were familiar. For instance this one:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Oud...page&q&f=false
one of the first ones I noticed-- number 5385-- says that if someone plants a weeping willow, they will die before it is old enough to shade their grave. My grandmother used to say that about a ceder she had planted in the yard. I pointed out that the reason for that bit of folklore is probably related to the tree simply taking a long time to grow. (FWIW, it went from an abandoned Christmas tree rescued before I was born to a tree taller than the nearby telephone pole before she died.)
BTW, the books are available at archive.org:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?qu...ina%20Folklore