Common Myths about Common Myths

blogging linguistics
2006-11-09

A quick Google search for “common myths about” turns up ~315,000 hits. Apparently, there are a lot of myths about:

The last one is the most surprising. I’m not even sure what the West Nile Virus is. Perhaps that’s why there are myths about it. But at least as regards the other subjects, it seems to be a slight cheat, and writing cliché, to ‘correct’ a set of myths without demonstrating that they exist. For example, here are some alleged myths concerning the subjects above:

Does anyone really believe any of this stuff anyway, or are these myths mythical?