Abstract
ALTHOUGH OBSCENITIES are fully functioning elements in the folk tales of all societies, they have an additional significance in connection with the tales told in modern urban America, in that they determine whether the mode of transmission of the tales is folkloristic, i.e., by world of mouth, or potentially literary. This is true because American literary tradition, for the most part, avoids obscenities. Non-obscene tales are frequently published as newspaper fillers, or in anthologies, and have a more pervasive function in providing plots, incidents, and characters for short stories of the popular magazine type; hence they soon creep out of the realm of folklore into that of literature. Obscene stories, on the other hand, have a tendency to remain in the purely oral tradition, with the consequence that almost all of the urban American folk tales that can be compared with the folk tales of non-literate peoples contain obscenities.
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