![]() From opera to jazz to modern pop, New York has been instrumental in the evolution of music. The city is a true melting pot, with a diverse range of cultural influences on art and expression. New York was also home to CBGB and Studio 54. It is home to Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House, the Apollo Theater, and the Juilliard School. That’s why, even if the origins of the word “history” are clear, the question of who gets to decide which version of the past is the right one remains a contentious debate centuries after the term came to be.New York City has provided the backdrop for many of the greatest movements in modern music. You haven’t heard my story yet,” that statement might have nothing to do with etymology but it can suggest a lot about race and whether an African-American viewpoint is included in the tales passed down in textbooks. Take the fact that similar plays on the word have been made by people in other marginalized groups too: When jazz musician Sun Ra quipped that “history is only his story. And more importantly, the fact that it sounds plausible that there would be a link can still tell us something. But sociolinguist Ben Zimmer says there’s evidence that the feminists knew as much at the time. ![]() And some critics pointed that out back in the 1970s, saying that the invention of herstory showed ignorance about where the word comes from. That is why feminists, for example, rejected the word history and championed the notion of herstory during the 1970s, says ’s Jane Solomon, “to point out the fact that history has mostly come from a male perspective.” The “his” in history has nothing, linguistically, to do with the pronoun referring to a male person. Yet it isn’t, humans being the imperfect and hierarchical creatures that they are and history being something that is made rather than handed down from some omniscient scribe. Yet the word stands up just fine to that stress because the term story has come to describe such varying amounts of truth and fiction.Īs the linguistic divide has evolved since the Middle Ages, we have come to expect more from history - that it be free from the flaws of viewpoint and selective memory that stories so often contain. To someone else, that account might be as incorrect as the notion that storks deliver babies. To them, that account might be as correct as any note about a president’s birthplace. Take the notion of someone telling their side of a story. And plenty of stories defy easy categorization one way or the other. Plenty of stories - like the story of a person’s life or a “true story” on which a less-true film is based - are supposed to be factual. The distinction is still messier than that, of course. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. That word refers to all time preceding this very moment and everything that really happened up to now.įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Histories, on the other hand, are records of events. That word can even be used to describe an outright lie. Stories are fanciful tales woven at bedtime, the plots of melodramatic soap operas. “That working out of distinction,” says Durkin, “has taken centuries and centuries.” Today, we might think of the dividing line as the one between fact and fiction. The words story and history share much of their lineage, and in previous eras, the overlap between them was much messier than it is today. And from there it’s a short jump to the accounts of events that a person might put together from making inquiries - what we might call stories. The Greek word historia originally meant inquiry, the act of seeking knowledge, as well as the knowledge that results from inquiry. ![]() The short version is that the term history has evolved from an ancient Greek verb that means “to know,” says the Oxford English Dictionary’s Philip Durkin.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |