Almost all of us recognize a story when we encounter one, but often we are hard-pressed to spell out exactly what a story _is_. It seems too simple, too childlike perhaps, to bother with in a scholarly context. We all use the word, but we do not ask what (if anything) it really stands for. To begin with, we need to discuss _story_ in the context of at least two other English words with which it has overlapped and from which it has diverged. These words are _history_ and _tale_. _Story_ is a shortened form of _estorie_, the Anglo-Norman form of Latin _historia_, which in turn derives from the Greek _histor_ (man of learning, man of authority) and thus has to do with knowledge. Yet a history was also a _presentation_ of knowledge, since the _histor_ stood in the marketplace and proclaimed significant new events to his community (the role taken today by TV newsreaders). In its origins, history was an oral “account of things that happened” (the root meanings of the Chinese characters _Gu-Shi_; compare Latin _res gestae_ [things done]). Similarly, the Old English word _talu_ (modern _tale_) simply meant “something told.” Our modern distinction between fact and fiction...