[Ads-l] Antedating of "Urban Legend"

[Shapiro, Fred]

urban legend (OED 1931)

I found this on a website while Googling:

Charles C. Doyle of the University of Georgia, USA, recently discovered the earliest usage of the term "urban legend" that has so far been found. This reference, which he forwarded to me, deserves to be more widely known. An unsigned editorial published in the New York Times for December 6, 1925 (page E12), titled "Europe's Population Growth," begins: "The contrast between an under-populated United States and a Europe over-populated has just been drawn by a distinguished visitor to this country."
The article goes on to suggest that these population trends, if they continue, are not due to "a reckless birth rate," but rather to "the death rate that is being cut down." The mistaken notion of the causes of these population trends are dubbed "legends," evidently using the term in the sense of "misinformation." The third paragraph of the article begins: "Around the subject of population there has been a growth of popular legend hard to remove. Great Britain illustrates the urban legend."
Later in the article the term "legend" occurs once more: "France has furnished the most widely disseminated legend about population increase." It seems that we may have here a possible argument for using "urban legend" rather than "modern legend" or "contemporary legend" for our subject area: "urban legend" has been around a lot longer than we ever suspected.

Fred Shapiro

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