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[ noun ] short account of an incident (especially a biographical one)
Used in print (Tristram P. Coffin, "Folklore in the American Twentieth...)Enthusiastically , Americans have swept subliterary and bogus materials like Paul_Bunyan tales , Abe_Lincoln anecdotes and labor_union songs up as true products of our American oral tradition . As a result , most people do n't have more than a vague idea what folklore actually is ; they see it as a potpourri of charming , moral legends and patriotic anecdotes , with a superstition or remedy thrown_in here_and_there . (Howard Nemerov, "Themes and Methods: The Early...)Something of this can be learned from `` The_Way_to_the_Churchyard '' ( 1901 ) , an anecdote about an old failure whose fit of anger at a passing cyclist causes him to die of a stroke or seizure . In method as_well_as in theme this little anecdote with its details selected as much for expressiveness and allegory as for `` realism '' , anticipates a kind of musical_composition , as_well as a kind of fictional composition , in which , as Leverku^hn says , `` there shall be nothing unthematic '' . (Marvin Schiller, "The Sheep's in the Meadow,"...)The letters took their source from a stream of my imagination in which I was transformed into a young_man not unlike my bunkmate Eliot_Sands - he of the porch steps anecdotes - who smoked cigarettes , performed the tango , wore fifty dollar suits , and sneaked_off into the dark with girls to do unimaginable things with them . Related terms |
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