Dictionary

folk memory en · NOUN

Meanings

1. (uncountable, usually) The collective lore, beliefs, and traditional stories which help to define a society, culture, or nation.
   • Arguments about the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor . . . underpinned the popular fear and loathing of the workhouse that endure in folk memory. 2011 October 18, Peter Beresford, “Harassing people on benefits degrades us all”, in The Guardian, UK, retrieved 08 Jun 2014:
   • That leisured past . . . is insistently evoked in Mr. Kiely's new collection. A compendium of folk memory, it features great bursts of balladry and doggerel. 1988 Aug. 21, Julia O'Faolain, "Bard of the Bar" (review of A Letter to Peachtree and Nine Other Stories by Benedict Kiely), New York Times (retrieved 8 June 2014)
   • James Wilson would have been bewildered and horrified to learn that 150 years later Britain is credited in the Irish folk memory—and general liberal opinion—with callously allowing a million people to starve to death. 1997 June 3, Ruth Dudley Edwards, “No need to apologise for the potato famine”, in The Independent, UK, retrieved 08 Jun 2014:
2. (countable, usually) A belief, traditional story, or the like, which is common to the people of a particular culture; especially, such a belief or piece of knowledge that is not consciously held but is nonetheless known.
   • But behind these folk-memories of national history, extending over more than a thousand years, there is, in the popular consciousness, a dim background of a far earlier period. 1898, The Scottish Review, volume XXXII, page 126:
   • Did the watchers retain a folk memory that they themselves resulted from a mating of different types: a black human and a pale Neanderthal? 2018, Tim Flannery, Europe: A Natural History, page 186:
   • In the island of Lewis, librations [sic] were offered, to "Shoney," a sea fairy, in order to bring seaweed, this being a folk-memory of an ancient sea god or goddess, to whom offerings of ale were made by the Vikings at Halloween. 1913 December 20, The Fitzroy City Press, Melbourne, page 4, column 5:

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