The article's first paragraph is golden Rudeness has consequences in fairy tales. Strangers met on the road may be more than they seem, so politeness is pruden

The article's first paragraph is golden Rudeness has consequences in fairy tales. Strangers met on the road may be more than they seem, so politeness is prudent. If a farmer is working his land and a passing old man asks what he’s sowing, he had better not answer, “I’m sowing cocks!” if he doesn’t want three-foot-tall phalluses sprouting in his field at harvest time. This is the lesson of “A Crop of Cocks,” one of more than a hundred obscene folktales compiled by the nineteenth-century Russian ethnographer Aleksandr Afanasev.