By Dr. Alan Jabbour. Folklorist and former Director of the American Folklore Center by Autumn Libal. The word folklore means the cultural traditions that are learned and passed along by ordinary people as part of the fabric of their lives and culture. Folklore may be passed along in verbal form, like the urban legend that we hear about from friends, who assure us that it really happened to a friend of their cousin. Or it may be tunes or dance steps we picked up on the block, or ways of shaping things to use or admire out of materials readily available to us, like that quilt, your aunt made. Often we acquire folklore without even fully realizing where, or how we learned it.