Location Taken: Washington DC
Time Taken: November 2008
It struck me the other day that we refer to both tales and levels of a building as a “story”. You know, “tell me a story” and “I live in a two-story house”.
It seems odd at first. What could a fairytale and how many layers of floors a place has have in common? Is it just a coincidence, two words with very different meanings that happened to end up with the same spelling at some point?
It’s not a coincidence, though, which is even odder. Both words come from the latin “historia”. As you may guess, that became history as well, which at least tells you where the tale version came from. Going from “telling of things that did happen” to “telling of things that could happen” isn’t a big leap at all.
But the building thing? How is that at all related to history?!?
According to the various etymology sites I looked at, during the middle ages, they decorated houses with painted pictures which, well, told a story. And going from “He lives on the floor with the story about the goat, you know, the second one up” to “He lives on the second story” does make a certain amount of sense.
There’s another odd poetic element to it, though. We tend to live our lives contained within certain stories of certain buildings. If you live in an apartment, or work in an office in a skyscraper, how many times have you gone to a different story in your building. Perhaps some of them, where friends or business associates hang out, but all of them? In the narrative of human lives, how each story of a building acts, what cast of characters it has, what tales it tells, they’re surprisingly varied.
So perhaps we’ve retained some of that old meaning. All the people and doings on one floor form a story, which is fairly different from that of the story above. Or below, I suppose.
