the.com/tale
a lie that pays rent by telling truths nobody dares say straight
means A story, told or written, often imaginative or fictional, and sometimes a false or exaggerated account meant to mislead.
from From Old English 'talu,' meaning a tale, story, or reckoning — and tellingly, also 'a counting,' since to 'tell' once meant to count (a sense still alive in a bank teller and in tallying). The Germanic roots run deep, with cousins in Old Norse 'tala' (speech, number) and German 'Zahl' (number). So a tale was once kin to arithmetic: an account given, a tally of words set in order, long before it learned to lie convincingly.
- old root
- shares an ancestor with 'tell' and 'tally'
- survival kit
- oral tales predate writing by tens of millennia
- fairy origin
- early versions were brutal, not bedtime-friendly
- tall tale
- American frontier sport of competitive exaggeration
canterbury tales — geoffrey chaucer's 1387 work of 24 interconnected stories told by pilgrims traveling to canterbury
tale of genji — 11th-century japanese novel by murasaki shikibu, considered world's first novel