Short answers, pulled from the story.
Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people, culture, or subculture. It includes oral traditions like tales, legends, proverbs, and jokes, material culture such as traditional building styles, and customary lore including folk beliefs, festivals, and rituals. These traditions are passed along informally from one person to another, not learned through a formal school curriculum.
The Englishman William Thoms coined the word folklore in 1846. He devised it as a replacement for the terms popular antiquities and popular literature. The word combines folk with lore, and lore comes from the Old English lar, meaning instruction.
Folklore artifacts are commonly classified as material, verbal, or customary lore. Verbal lore covers spoken and sung forms like jokes and folktales, material lore covers physical objects like quilts and folk art, and customary lore covers expected behaviors like birthday celebrations and seasonal festivals. A fourth major subgenre, childlore, covers children's folklore and games.
Folklore began to distinguish itself as a discipline during the period of romantic nationalism in Europe. Johann Gottfried von Herder presented oral traditions as organic processes in his writings of the 1770s, and his approach was adopted by Germans for nation building after Napoleonic France invaded the German states. The Kinder- und Hausmarchen of the Brothers Grimm, first published in 1812, became the best-known early collection.
Childlore is a distinct branch of folklore that deals with activities passed from children to other children, away from the influence or supervision of an adult. It circulates within an informal, pre-literate children's network and excludes things adults teach directly. Iona and Peter Opie studied it in their book Children's Games in Street and Playground.
The American Folklife Preservation Act, Public Law 94-201, was passed by the U.S. Congress in January 1976 to coincide with the Bicentennial, and it marked the coming of age of folkloristics in the United States. It defined folklife as traditional expressive culture shared within familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, and regional groups. The law treated cultural diversity as a national strength worthy of protection.
Folklorists find that the internet is modifying the folkloric process rather than killing it, as people continue using traditional expressive forms in new media. Jokes remain plentiful both face-to-face and electronically, and stories like Snow White now appear as a television show and a video game. Yeh and colleagues argued in 2023 that user-generated content, such as YouTube reviews in mental health communities, should be considered a modern form of folklore.