Barnard College, officially titled as Barnard College, Columbia University, is a private women's liberal arts college in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1889 by a group of women led by young student activist Annie Nathan Meyer, who petitioned Columbia University's trustees to create an affiliated college named after Columbia's then-recently deceased 10th president, Frederick A. P. Barnard. The college is one of the original Seven Sisters—seven liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States that were historically women's colleges.
Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people, culture or subculture. This includes oral traditions such as tales, myths, legends, proverbs, poems, jokes, and other oral traditions. This also includes material culture, such as traditional building styles common to the group. Folklore also encompasses customary lore, taking actions for folk beliefs, and the forms and rituals of celebrations such as Christmas, weddings, folk dances, and initiation rites.
Jumping the broom is a phrase and custom relating to a wedding ceremony in which the couple jumps over a broom. It is most widespread among African Americans and Black Canadians, popularized during the 1970s by the novel and miniseries Roots, and originated in mid-19th-century antebellum slavery in the United States. The custom is also attested in Irish weddings.
A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition:
A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry.
Rice University, officially William Marsh Rice University, is a private research university in Houston, Texas, United States. It sits on a 300-acre (120 ha) campus adjacent to the Houston Museum District and the Texas Medical Center.
In medicine and biology, scatology or coprology is the study of faeces.
Faxlore is a sort of folklore: humorous texts, folk poetry, folk art, and urban legends that are circulated, not by word of mouth, but by fax machine. Xeroxlore or photocopylore is similar material circulated by photocopying.
Folklore studies is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. It became established as a field across both Europe and North America, coordinating with Volkskunde (German), folkeminner (Norwegian), and folkminnen (Swedish), among others.
The Marching Owl Band is the Rice University "marching band" in the sense that it is the official ensemble that performs during football games, some basketball games, parades, and other public events. There are over 100 members. However, the MOB is not a traditional marching band, but rather a scatter band; members do not march, and some members play non-standard instruments. For example, in recent seasons these instruments included violins, violas, a cello, electric guitar, electric bass, electric piano, and even a harp. Extras known as Show Assistants are also a perennial inclusion in the MOB; these students play no instruments besides the kazoo, but are responsible for constructing and employing props in the halftime shows and acting out any mime or gag bits during performances. Rather than wear traditional marching band attire, The MOB instead dons pinstriped three-piece suits, ties, sunglasses, fedoras, and tommy gun props. The group is known for satirical football halftime shows which, as MOB director Chuck Throckmorton says, poke fun at rival universities' sacred cows.
Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is an adult-oriented "romantic comedy" visual novel/dating sim developed by United Pixtures and published by Kirin Entertainment in September 1994 for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. Although the game did have a Microsoft Windows version in 1993, it had very limited distribution and was published by United Pixtures itself. The game stars Edward J. Foster and Jeanne Basone as John and Jane, respectively; two people who are being pressured by their respective parents to go out and find a spouse. The player's task is to get John and Jane together.
Alan Dundes was an American folklorist. He spent much of his career as a professional academic at the University of California, Berkeley and published his ideas in a wide range of books and articles.
An elephant joke is a joke cycle, almost always an absurd riddle or conundrum and often a sequence of such, that involves an elephant. Elephant jokes were a fad in the 1960s, with many people constructing large numbers of them according to a set formula. Sometimes they involve parodies or puns.
The Ancient and Honorable Order of Turtles started as an informal "drinking club" between American World War II pilots, for humor and camaraderie. Any member who was asked "Are you a Turtle?" needed to reply, loudly, "You bet your sweet ass I am", or buy the questioner a drink. The Turtle Club also has a number of membership cards with instructions on recruiting new members, which requires asking three to four riddles for which it is difficult to think up answers other than the obvious vulgar ones. The answer to "What goes in hard and comes out soft" is "gum". It was historically exclusively a men's group. It is an amorphous group and is organized formally in some places and loosely in others, and is popular in bars.
Purity rings are rings worn as a sign of chastity. Since the 1990s, Christian organizations in the United States used the purity ring as a symbol of commitment. In particular, Catholic and evangelical Christian groups which promoted virginity pledges and virginity before marriage, such as True Love Waits and Silver Ring Thing. Wearing a purity ring is typically accompanied by a religious vow to practice abstinence until marriage. Chastity rings are part of the abstinence-only sex education movement and are intended to act as a physical reminder of the wearer's chastity vow.
A double-barreled question is an informal fallacy. It is committed when someone asks a question that touches upon more than one issue, yet allows only for one answer. This may result in inaccuracies in the attitudes being measured for the question, as the respondent can answer only one of the two questions, and cannot indicate which one is being answered.
Unisex public toilets are public toilets that are not separated by gender or sex.
A purity ball is a formal dance event typically practiced by some conservative Christian groups in the United States. The events are attended by fathers and their teenage daughters in order to promote virginity until marriage. Typically, daughters who attend a purity ball make a virginity pledge to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Fathers who attend a purity ball make a promise to protect their young daughters' "purity of mind, body, and soul." The balls are considered a part of purity culture.
"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher" is an English sentence used to demonstrate lexical ambiguity and the necessity of punctuation, which serves as a substitute for the intonation, stress, and pauses found in speech. In human information processing research, the sentence has been used to show how readers depend on punctuation to give sentences meaning, especially in the context of scanning across lines of text. The sentence is sometimes presented as a puzzle, where the solver must add the punctuation.
Josef Feinhals (1867–1947), aka Collofino, was a German cigar and cigarette maker, patron of the arts, and writer from Cologne. Under his pseudonym, he wrote Non Olet, an 1,100-page scatological collection (1939). He was a good friend of Hermann Hesse and assisted Hesse in some of his projects. His pseudonym, Collofino, is Italian for "slender neck", an approximate translation of his real name, "Feinhals".
Riddles have at times been an important literary or folk-literary form in South Asia. Indeed, it is thought that the world's earliest surviving poetic riddles are those found in the Sanskrit Rigveda.
