The word for today is…
folklore (noun) – 1. The traditional beliefs, myths, tales, and practices of a people, transmitted orally.
- The comparative study of folk knowledge and culture. Also called folkloristics.
- (a) A body of widely accepted but usually spurious notions about a place, group, or institution.
(b) A popular but unfounded belief.
Source : The Free Dictionary
Etymology : “Traditional beliefs and customs of the common people,” 1846, coined by antiquarian William J. Thoms (1803-1885) as an Anglo-Saxonism (replacing popular antiquities) in imitation of German compounds in Volk- and first published in the Athenaeum of Aug. 22, 1846; see folk + lore. Old English folclar meant “homily.”
This word revived folk in a modern sense of “of the common people, whose culture is handed down orally,” and opened up a flood of compound formations: Folk art (1892), folk-hero (1874), folk-medicine (1877), folk-tale (1850; Old English folctalu meant “genealogy”), folk-song (1847, “a song of the people,” translating German Volkslied), folk-singer (1876), folk-dance (1877).
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