Back in the early 1970's the BMW car people had an advertising hook: "We are
about to explode a myth" I hope it wasn't their cars! They are one of the
first to recycle them and perhaps they meant the "Daisy" engine in the
Mini-Cooper they now produce.

I would have to weigh in on the side of Levi-Strauss when it comes to myth.
They are complicated constructs, and perhaps there are two levels of
"parole" in human speech, as written about by linguist Nancy Bonvillain,
Ph.D., about Mohawk myth, she having compiled a Mohawk dictionary in her
fieldwork. "Saladatee" is hello in Mohawk and I have been informed recently,
"Ohnagee-wahi" is goodbye, those two expressions also having many meanings
in our own English, and other languages. They used to put it on kids swim
trunks in the late 1950's, "Hello" on the front, "Goodbye" on the back, and
one of our great film actors, baby's behind on the Coppertone billboards,
Jodie Foster. Humphrey Bogart's mom painted the Gerber baby and got rooked
in the deal.

But seriously, as a WordWeb definition: "A traditional story accepted as
history; serves to explain the world view of a people" could be seen from a
structural-functional view as in Radcliffe-Brown, and I agree, a sometimes
difficult thing to understand unless a part of it, or famliar with it in a
different setting. I recently read an interesting story about "Snowsnake" a
Seneca name given to NY State's former archaeologist Arthur C. Parker and
native Seneca (or part of the western New York peoples) and can see on one
hand "snowsnake" is a game played in many places in the North woods around
the globe in winter, and on the other hand see the mythology around it. It's
actually a fascinating winter sport where one tries to propel a carved stick
over frozen snow, the greatest distance and has many variations. And it's
also a drink.

George Myers
George Myers


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