Story
by
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...
This essay may be found on page 174 of the printed volume.