Meaning of folk memory | Babel Free

Definitions

1. The collective lore, beliefs, and traditional stories which help to define a society, culture, or nation.
   uncountable, usually
2. 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.
   countable, usually

Examples

“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.”

“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.”

“Arguments about the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor . . . underpinned the popular fear and loathing of the workhouse that endure in folk memory.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Did the watchers retain a folk memory that they themselves resulted from a mating of different types: a black human and a pale Neanderthal?”

CEFR level