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Boogeyman? That’s just some old story! Do you see a boogeyman out here? Photo by Jo Barnard on Unsplash
Post-Halloween spookiness
We didn’t go all out for Halloween last edition. It’s already time to start swapping ghosts and ghouls for Pilgrims, pies, and horns of plenty. But let’s give Halloween one last gasp. Or maybe even two.
First up, we have 6 Appalachian Folk Stories That Will Keep You Up at Night.
Included are the Mothman, the Moon-Eyed People, and the Bell Witch, which I’ve encountered before.
In print, I mean. Not in person.
There are also the Wampus Cat, the Flatwoods Monster, and the Brown Mountain Lights, with which I am less familiar.
The Wampus Cat sounds friendly! That’s a friendly name!
But no.
The Wampus Cat is the name given to a feline creature with glowing yellow eyes and six legs. The legend involves the Cherokee but is not a story from Native American legend. Rather, it is a story about Cherokee people as characters in the tale of how the Wampus Cat came to be.
The name Wampus Cat is thought to derive from an old regional name for the Eastern Cougar, the catamount. In time, this transformed into the word catawampus, which described any strange animal that roamed the hills of Appalachia. Eventually, it further evolved into the Wampus Cat, and different versions of its origins are told throughout the region.
The most well-known origin story for the Wampus Cat says that a beautiful Cherokee woman was curious about the pre-hunting rituals that her husband and the other tribal warriors did before going into the woods. In an attempt at stealthy seeing the rites, the woman disguised herself in the skin of a cougar and hid behind a rock while the shaman performed the ceremony. However, she was found, and the shaman cursed the woman by changing her into a human-cougar hybrid.
So the Wampus Cat is a six-legged Cherokee were-cougar. Got it.
She became known as the Wampus Cat and is said to roam Appalachia alone, wreaking violent havoc against other animals and frightening humans everywhere she goes.
Oh. An angry six-legged Cherokee were-cougar. Best not to hike those hills alone…
But do read the article for more about these Appalachian legends!
Here, kitty, kitty, kitty! Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash
Around the world with the Boogeyman
Like a dim-witted teenager in a horror film who just heard a strange noise in the basement, let’s keep going.
It seems that every culture and every nation has at least one boogeyman figure that haunts its hills or forests or swamps and is sure to getcha if you don’t watch out!
Whether it was the Boogeyman, Krampus, or El Coco, most of us grew up with a mysterious, scary figure that lurked in the shadows. Our parents would bring it up as a way to make us behave or make sure we went to bed at night.
Depending on where you grew up, this figure could take on many forms. Sometimes it's an evil witch, sometimes it's a zombie, and sometimes it's just a straight-up monster. And though scaring your kid into behaving is now known to not be the best technique psychologically, there are still some good reasons to talk about these legendary figures at the appropriate time. In some cultures, using allegories and storytelling is the prime way that parents teach their children to regulate their emotions.
The Boogeyman takes many forms. You have to know what to look out for depending where you are. Helpfully, the folks at The Toy Zone have put together a visual guide, which I found via My Modern Met.
How scary are these things? Bigfoot and Chupacabra didn’t even make the list, much less Wampus Cat or the Mothman. These are A-list nightmares only.
Here’s What the Spookiest “Boogeyman” Looks Like in Different Countries
The Boogeyman is everywhere! Image: The Toy Zone CCA-SA
If you click through to the article, there are several more maps zooming in on each continent and giving more detail about the local iterations of the Thing You Don’t Want to Meet in the Dark.
Plan your travels accordingly!
Head cannon go boom!
As scary as Cuca, the Jersey Devil, or Baba Yaga might be, they are sugarplum fairies next to the Grammar Gremlin that seems to haunt the Internet these days.
Do you wince or grit your teeth when you run into examples of poor grammar online?
This article rounds up some common examples: The 11 extremely common grammar mistakes that make people cringe—and make you look less smart: Word experts
Apostrophes turning up in the wrong place, while absent in the right place. Mixing up too and to or its and it’s. Mangling lie and lay or lose and loose.
Or my personal bête noires:
People who swap cannon for canon. Ex: “In my head cannon, the Star Wars sequels never happened.” You have a cannon on your head? Really? Does that not cause severe neck strain?
People who confuse rein and reign. Ex: “Without any supervision she has free reign.” No. Just no. It’s rein as in horses. As in loosening the reins and letting them run. Unless you already shot the horses with your head cannon.
These abominations makes my eyes water. I’m sure you, Gentle Reader, have your own pet grammar peeves. You probably feel your blood pressure spike whenever you see them.
That’s not all in your head. It’s canon.
It turns out that encountering painfully bad grammar really is painful.
It’s not just me saying this — it’s Science!
Hearing bad grammar results in physical signs of stress, new study reveals
A new study by professors at the University of Birmingham has revealed for the first time how our bodies go into stress-mode when hearing misused grammar.
The study, "Physiological responses and cognitive behaviours: Measures of heart rate variability index language knowledge" is published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics. The dataset used in the study is available here.
For the research, professors Dagmar Divjak, Professorial Research Fellow in Cognitive Linguistics and Language Cognition at the University of Birmingham, and Professor Petar Milin, Professor of Psychology of Language and Language Learning, discovered a direct correlation between instances of bad grammar and subjects' Heart Rate Variability (HRV).
HRV captures the time between successive heart beats. The length of the intervals between a person's successive heart beats tends to be variable when they are relaxed but becomes more regular when they are stressed. The new study reveals a statistically significant reduction in HRV in response to grammatical violations. This reduction reflects the extent of the grammatical violations, suggesting that the more errors a person hears, the more regular their heartbeat becomes—a sign of stress.
Learn the difference between there, they’re, and their, Internet!
Please! You’re hurting people.
Hyperbolic hyperventilation for comic effect aside, the study pinpoints an interesting relationship between language cognition and the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Hearing or reading bad grammar triggers the “fight or flight” response. That’s wild if you think about it — linguistic errors may annoy you but they aren’t going to kill you. Yet, to a certain extent our body responds in the same way it does to danger.
Fascinating.
One final note — as I thought about this topic it occurred to me that when I encounter grammar errors from someone I know is not a native English speaker, I have much less of an autonomic stress reaction. Knowing the speaker / writer didn’t grow up speaking English counteracts what would otherwise be annoying. I actually feel more kindly toward the person making the error, and if the situation or relationship is appropriate, will offer a friendly correction.
Same with errors by children. I think these cases would make for interesting follow up studies.1
Read the paper here: "Physiological responses and cognitive behaviours: measures of heart rate variability index language knowledge" Journal of Neurolinguistics, Volume 69, February 2024.2
We don’t need no education. Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash
Thank you for reading!
Please click the hearts, leave a comment, and use the share feature to send this issue to a friend who might enjoy it. See you next Thursday!
If you find a grammar error in this edition of Thursday Things, it was totally on purpose. Yeah. It was to see if you were paying attention. That’s the ticket! So … good job.
I know! This article is from the future! Actually, it’s a pre-print, but you can already read it online.