Item Detail
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Pocket Knife Etiquete
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2/4/2016
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Provo, UT
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Female
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Denver, CO
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Parker, CO
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22
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Self
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American/Caucasian
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Mormon/LDS
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I am an active member of the LDS church and served a mission in the Knoxville, Tennessee area from 2013 to 2014. Much of my time was spent in the countryside around a variety of people. I had always wanted a pocket knife like my brothers, but my mom would never get me one. In Tennessee, there were a lot of knife stores, and since my mom wasn’t around, I bought my first knife, and some of the people whom I knew gave me pocket knives when they heard about my interest.
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Lafayette, Georgia is located in the northern part of Georgia near the Tennessee border and just south of Chattanooga. The surrounding areas were very rural and poor. The houses were extremely far apart, and many people had collections of weapons including guns and knives. It had become a sort of tradition for the missionaries, particularly the elders, to get a knife while they were on their missions because of the\rnumerous knife stores and the local interest in knives. The elders in our area took my companion and me to a local knife store on P-Day in Fort Oglethorpe a few times to get knives for ourselves.
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A mission is for single LDS women aged 19 or older and single LDS men aged 18 or over to preach about Jesus Christ full time for 18 months to 2 years. Missionaries are often assigned to a place that they are not from, far from their homes, and they do not see their families for the duration of their mission. They do not get paid for their service to their church. A set of 2-3 missionaries of the same gender is called a companionship. A companionship is assigned an area or town in which to work. Male missionaries are given the title of Elder and female missionaries the title of Sister, and these are used in conjunction with their last names (i.e. Elder Watson or Sister Mortensen). P-Day, or Preparation Day, is the day of the week where\rmissionaries are allowed to take a break from preaching in order to do laundry, go grocery shopping, get other necessities taken care of, and also an opportunity to hang out with other missionaries who are located close by.
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knife, pocket knife, knives, bad luck
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How collected: This is a tradition that was passed on to me by Elder Austin Watson from Ducktown, Tennessee. The account is written from memory.\rText: I had always wanted a pocket knife, but my parents would never let me have one. When I was on my mission, I took the opportunity of being away from my parents to go and view and purchase on multiple P-Days. I ended up with about 7 knives of various shapes and sizes. Some were purchased and some were gifts from local congregation members. Since I had never had a pocket knife before, I often had difficulty closing the knife after I had opened it. If the Elders were around, they would offer to help me to keep me from cutting my fingers. I guess they didn't trust a girl with a knife not to cut herself. Elder Watson was often the closest at hand, and he would help me but never close my knife all the way. He said that it was bad luck to close a knife you hadn't opened, so he would always get the blade out of the locked position and then have me fold it down the rest of the way. Since then, whenever I show people my knives, I make sure that if I opened it that I'm the one to\rclose it and warn them of the potential bad luck of closing a knife you didn't open.
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Shana
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Pickett
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Female
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22
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English 392
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Eric Eliason