fullspate podcasts

 Audio list   HOME

Urban Legends

Urban Legends are odd little stories that spread through a society by word of mouth. It quickly seems as if everyone has heard of them but no one is sure whether to believe them.

Here we have a short article about urban legends which first appeared in the New Scientist magazine (14 April 2007, p52). To hear the audio version click the wave icon below.


Fan Death.

Transcript

Fan Death

Did you know that there is something deadly lurking in your bedroom? Leave an electric fan running overnight with the door and windows shut, and you can suffocate to death. The fan uses up all the oxygen in the room and produces lethal amounts of carbon dioxide. Dozens perish every year. It happened to a friend of a friend of mine.

Sounds ridiculous? Of course it does, but then we're talking about urban legends here. This particular example, known as fan death, circulates in South Korea. While it's safe to assume most South Koreans don't believe a word of it, enough pass it on to keep the idea alive.

Before you scoff, be assured that every culture has its share of word-of-mouth nonsense. There isn't a society in the world that doesn't have stories belonging in the same category as those about alien abductions, or about the secret meaning behind the numbers 9 and 11, or about the hundreds of deadly diseases you can catch from the average train seat.

So what is it that keeps urban legends going even when they're clearly a load of nonsense? Strangely enough, they seem to perform a vital social function: nothing brings us together like a good story.

In a paper published last year, a team of researchers from a university in New Zealand analyzed what it is about urban legends that makes them so compelling. They concluded that it wasn't the information they convey but the entertainment value of the story. If it is entertaining the story will keep the listener's attention, and this will help to enhance the relationship between the speaker and the listener.

Another study showed that the stories that become the most widespread tend to be those that make you go "yuck!" or send a chill down your spine. It was found that people were more likely to pass on stories that provoked disgust or horror - the more disturbing, the better. Fan death fits the bill perfectly, with its blend of unexpected danger and a gruesome end.

So next time you're trying to bond with someone, or you're stuck for an entertaining bit of conversation, why not ask if anyone's heard about those flesh-eating worms that live inside baked beans...?


Vocabulary Search

Look for words in red in the article that match the following.

  1. improve
  2. to speak in a way that shows you think something is stupid, worthless and inferior
  3. extremely important
  4. able to kill you
  5. the line of bones going up the centre of your back
  6. able to grab your attention and keep it
  7. a cold feeling
  8. die
  9. no longer able to breathe
  10. skin and muscle and other soft parts of the body
  11. to be secretly waiting to attack someone
  12. communicate; put across
  13. a cold feeling
  14. horrible and shocking (usually inolving injury or death)
  15. taking someone away by force

Style Point

If you might have to write articles yourselves in the future, that one from New Scientist could serve as an example of a good writing style. To help you think a little more about some of the style points do the following exercise. First you need to be aware that if you flick through a typical newspaper you will come across a variety of styles of writing. Often the style of writing on the first few pages, where we have the news reports, is different from that used in articles in the centre of the paper. Below we have some pieces of advice an editor might give to a writer who is learning the ropes. Try to identify which pieces of advice have been followed in the article about fan deaths.

  1. Address the reader directly - use the word "you" from time to time.
  2. When you receive information about an event try to report it as objectively as possible.
  3. Try to inject a little humour to entertain the reader.
  4. Avoid expressions that indicate your opinion of something (e.g. "the judge wisely decided that ..." Or: "it is outrageous that ...")
  5. Spend some time thinking of a first paragraph that will really grab the reader's attention.
  6. Use rhetorical questions - they are a particularly good device for changing the topic when beginning a new paragraph.
  7. If you refer to information that has already been published, give the precise details (including page numbers) of where it can be found so that readers can check the source for themselves.
  8. Avoid long paragraphs.
  9. Don't forget to end with a paragraph that sums up the most important points in your article.

For more interesting things from the New Scientist magazine, visit www.newscientist.com

For lots more urban legends, see www.snopes.com