A lot of... ahh.. less-technological.. peoples develop some odd beliefs about electrical and eletronic devices. They also tend to be willing to believe 'allegorical truths' (to quote the book) readily. Given that they may have no reason to *not* believe that, say, a cell phone could explode, a camera steal your soul, or that combs could make you sterile.

Someone has a stroke and dies in his room with a fan blowing, friends discover him, the word spreads that 'hey, Fred died with a fan blowing in his room'... Correlation is drawn.

My aunt never lets me sleep with a fan on when I visit her (yes, I'm Korean). I dunno...maybe cos I'm 2nd generation, I'm fine with keeping the fan on all night during the summer, and (so far) I haven't died. (They also say that if you keep too many lilies in a closed room you can die from the heavy purfume. Whatever.) And I have heard people say that cutting the little thing under your tongue will help you speak English better, but I've never heard of anyone actually getting the surgery. Which is surprising, considering the other kinds of surgeries Korean are willing to subject themselves to. Like sticking metal rods in their shin bones with gears on the sides to make themselves taller (it takes 4 years and you have gears sticking out of your ankles! Why the heck would anyone do that?!).

Bobcat,
Koreans are hardly "less-technological" than Americans or other Westerners, and to be fair, they also have their fair share of weird myths about electronics. Just take a look at snopes.

I think it has more to do with general ignorance about how such things work, and nothing to do with specific cultures.

A fan does not cool a room, it simply moves the air about very quickly, causing a 'cooling' sensation. If the temperature in the room is 100degrees & you put a fan in that room, you are just moving around 100degree air. Also, the motor causes heat itself, it's more likely the room would get warmer than colder.

And I think it's the way the mouth moves in general that helps w/ language. That's why learning a language at a young age is easier, their jaws & tongue are still fairly new & do not have a set "muscle memory". Think of typing at a keyboard. If you've learned to use the homerow keys...every time you sit at a keyboard, you automatically go back to that position. Probably without thinking about it. By the time adulthood rolls around your mouth, jaw, & tongue have a specific way to move to help sounds out. You have a specific muscle memory & will have to practice all the time to perfect a new language.

I have to agree with John. We're not conscious of our own superstitions because everyone around us holds them. When I was a kid, I don't think you would have been able to find a single person, no matter how well educated,who didn't think that you should wait an hour after eating before going swimming. No matter how illogical some bit of urban lore is, if everyone believes it, you're treated like an idiot if you don't.

I cut my frenulum, not to aid in speech, but oral sex. Prior to doing it my tongue would only extend about a half inch outside my mouth. After doing it my tongue extends almost 3 times that.

Awhile back I had a piece of newspaper out to protect my table while doing a craft project. On the upside of the paper was an article about the Korean government's attempts to get parents to stop getting their kids this tongue surgery because the belief behind it wasn't true. If I remember right, the government wasn't having much success.

...I might actually have read that article.

Maegan, doesn't moving air around cause a real cooling effect? I mean, it's not just an illusion of cooling.

Back in high school I used to go kayaking a lot, and I know that if you fell out of the kayak in a swift-moving (cold) river, you could get hypothermia within minutes, because the water would just whisk all the heat away from your body. So you had to be really careful and get out of the water quickly. Whereas falling into a slow-moving canal, or something like that, was much less dangerous (in terms of hypothermia... obviously you don't need to worry about rapids in a canal either).

Okay, it works kinda like this.
If you put a thermometer in a glass of water (suspended, not touching the sides) and blow a fan, or even a leaf blower, at it, the temperature does not change.

However, if you take that glass (thinner glass, faster results) and cover the outside of it with water, the temperature will go down, because of the heat loss when the outside water evaporates.

If you stand in front of a fan with no moisture on you, all you feel is wind.

However, stand in front of the fan with any moisture on you, and you will get cold as the water evaporates. Don't believe it? Try it. As the water evaporates, you will get cold, but as it disappears, you will warm back up, even though the fan is still blowing.

There is no way that simply using a fan cools the air, or it would always be freezing out when it is windy (think of the wind in the desert). Also, there would be no need for refrigeration units or air conditioners, all you would need is a fan blowing on your food.

As for falling in cold water; the water, being cold, "sucks" the heat out of your body. This is simply the molecular structure stabilizing and homogenizing the local heat. It is also very deadly. It just sucks the heat out of you faster than your body can burn calories to warm it back up.

As for the frenulum debate, it brings to mind the Gene Simmons urban legend about how his tounge got so long. He has denied it so many time that he eventually went to a doctor and had it proven that he never had it done. Not that people believe him.

Waaay back in the 50's (n Tx), My mom and my doctor decided to cut my frenulum so I wouldn't be "tounge tied". I guess it worked, I've been talking ever since.

Oh, and for the record, to increase air pressure you have to compact the air somehow. A fan running in an enclosed space will not do that.
If you were to take a fan and blow it down a long tube that narrows, you increase the air speed but not the air pressure (at least not significantly enough to bother with).
But if you were to put a plastic bag on the end of that tube, the air pressure would increase because the air is being compacted, filling the bag.
A better demo would be with a balloon, because to inflate, the pressure on the inside must increase and then stabilize with the outside air pressure. Basically what I'm saying is that to increase the air pressure you have to have an open end on the system somwhere.

Thomas Merton, the famed American poet, essayist, and Trappist monk, was in fact killed by an electric fan while he was on a tour of East Asia. Apparently the fan had bad wiring, and when Merton touched either the fan itself or the table it sat on, he was electrocuted. So fans can kill you, but not by suffocation or hypothermia.

Relative difficulty of pronouncing Korean and English has nothing to do with the structure of the tongue. It's all a question of practice. Korean-Americans who grow up in the U.S. have no trouble pronouncing American English, and surely they have the same tongue shape as their parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins.
English has a fairly large set of phonemes (speech sounds) compared to most other languages, including several sounds that do not occur in Korean and that many Koreans find difficult to learn. It's a lot like when English speakers try to learn to pronounce French vowels.

Fan death is true. I was killed by fan death 6 months ago. But don't worry, it didn't even hurt.

it's not just korea. i was warned about "fan death" when i lived in rural japan.

Yes, I agree, cutting the lingual frenulum has no effect on speech.

Otherwise, we would heve to cut ours to speak English also, as we (being English speakers) have the exact same mouth structure as non-English speakers do.

Now all we have to do is somehow educate people so they will stop mutilating themselves or others for something that has absolutely no benefits (kinda like trepanation).

And of course James Bond himself kills a thug with a electric fan at the beginning of 'Goldfinger', by throwing him into a bath and knocking the fan on top of him. "Shocking", he says, "positively shocking", and then Shirley Bassey starts singing and the credits roll over a dancing girl painted gold.

I'm going to Korea to film a reality show with myself sleeping in a room with a fan running. The ratings I will get. I will have millions of Korean fans. GET IT!

Don't you suffocate if you're covered in paint?