How Long to Make a Tradition

[DWFII]

Well...I admit it I'm weak...I sat on this as long as I could hoping the urge would go away [sigh]

I am not going to get too deeply into a rebuttal just wanted to make an easily understood and easily recognizable comparison.

Accents...regional accents, whether they be a Southron drawl, a Vermont twang or a cockney growl share much in common with traditions. We all know that they serve no useful purpose (if they ever did) and the reasons why they began in the first place are lost in the mists of time. Yet they linger on.

They not only linger on but they are passed (some would say almost mindlessly) from generation to generation.

But they are the icons of unique cultures.

Now anyone is free to make up his own accent. Or even distort, change, or lose the one he is born to. And given enough time and several generations, they might even come into wide spread acceptance. But in the short term, and in the absence of a "Ministry of Silly Talks," people are just gonna think you're weird.

So too with traditions...it is no coincidence that the great constant among all the definitions, from the various sources that I presented, is the concept of "passing on from generation to generation," or of great age and long-time establishment of a practice for it to become a tradition.

This is part of what confuses people and what makes them uneasy, I suspect. Uneasy enough to invent their own definitions to justify or bolster preconceived notions or conclusions.

People just naturally want to think that the little ritual they contrived last year which made them feel so good, is the start of a tradition...and it very well may be. But unless it is passed down to the next generation and the next...the way I am fully confidant my 16 ounce tank will be, I think it fails the test.

On the other hand, people often want to separate "tradition" and "historical tradition"...again, I think , to give significance to things that are all too likely to be transient. But it is, in my opinion, a false impulse and a false dichotomy. All traditions share in some aspect of "historicity." Hence the emphasis on "passed on from generation to generation." If something that is important in a person's life can't have significance without having the inappropriate garnish of "tradition" perhaps it isn't really all that important in the first place.

To use terminology such as "historical traditions" is to fall victim to one of those redundant phrases such as "utmost extremity" or "infinite eternity."

Traditions are, by definition, a form of history.