Urban Legend
From SkepticWiki
[edit] Definition
An urban legend is an apocryphal story, usually circulated either via word-of-mouth or through Email, fax machines, photocopies, and so forth. In its most prototypical form, it is a narrative, presented as a true account of an actual event, of some implausible event or tale that bears some sort of implicit cautionary message. Examples of these include the "drying the dog in the microwave" story [1], which carries an implicit message about the dangers of modern technology. Urban legends are often presented as stories about events happening to anonymous people with whom the teller has an ambiguous connection, such as the ever-favored "friend of a friend of a friend" (often abbreviated FOAF). By definition, the teller does not know of the factual accuracy of the tale, but has merely heard it himself, but assumes it (and presents it) to be true.
Although the term "urban legend" has become largely synonymous with "false belief" ("Oh, that's only an urban legend; that never really happened."), some urban legends have some basis in fact or actual events. For example, an urban legend common on many college campuses is that "the roommate of a student who commits suicide automatically gets As in all of their classes." According to the widely-respected Snopes.com web site [2], "no college or university in the United States has a policy awarding a 4.0 average (or anything else) to a student whose roommate dies." On the other hand, the urban legend of "a student enters class late and mistakes some examples of "unsolvable problems" for homework, and then solves them" (the setup for the film Good Will Hunting) actually happened to the mathematician George Danzig in 1939. [3]
There are a large number of sites on the internet such as the well known Snopes previously mentioned that specialize in identifying and analyzing urban legends.
The term "urban legend" admits of many synonyms, among them UL, urban myth, urban belief tale, contemporary legend, and migratory legend.
