I had an interesting conversation this week with my co-worker. She informed me of a very dangerous appliance used in many people's homes: the electric fan. I pulled some funny, yet widely believed, information from Wikipedia.com and fandeath.net:
From Wikipedia:
Fan death is a South Korean urban legend, which states that an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can cause the death (by suffocation, poisoning, or hypothermia) of those inside. This belief also extends to air conditioners in the car. Fans manufactured and sold in Korea are equipped with a timer switch that turns them off after a set number of minutes, which users are frequently urged to set when going to sleep with a fan on.
From fandeath.net:
The only country to believe in fan death is South Korea. If you ask any Korean about fan death, they will almost certainly vehemently argue that it is indeed true. It seems Koreans of all ages, professions (including doctors) and education backgrounds believe it.
Koreans use the media as proof. Newspapers and TV continually attribute deaths to fans.
If you approach a Korean about this issue, their first instinct is to defend their culture to foreigners even though they may not agree with the belief themselves. I will commend anyone on his/her effort to convince a Korean that fan death may not be true, but I think it would be a very difficult task. Even if they did believe you, I still secretly believe they would turn off the fan, or make sure the window or door was open, when they went to bed.
1 comment:
That is way too funny!! Of course i suspect that we have our own myths too... but probably not as intense as that!
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