RING OUT THE OLD, RING IN THE NEW

by Steve Steinbock

What are you doing for New Years? One of my favorite traditions is watching lots of episodes of “Twilight Zone.” The SyFy channel runs a marathon each year. Starting at 8:00 am yesterday (Thursday, December 31) and running until 6:00 am tomorrow (Saturday, January 2) the SyFy channel will be showing old episodes of Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” around the clock.

If “Twilight Zone” isn’t your thing, you might enjoy the Doctor. BBC America will be showing episodes of “Doctor Who” all day today (from midnight to midnight, January 1) through tomorrow (Saturday, January 2) at 10:00 pm. These are all episodes from the David Tennant (The Tenth Doctor) years.

Tall Tales

I got curious this morning about the connection between the two uses of the word “story.” What does a narrative have to do with the floors of a building? It must have been Noah Webster who dropped the “e” from the traditional English “storey.” Did the different spellings mean the words had different origins? It took less than a minute of research to learn that they are related.

According to the Random House online dictionary, the usage related to buildings dates back to the second half of the fourteenth century when the word storie, from the Latin historia, referred to a “picture decorating a building, a part of the building so decorated, hence floor, story.” A little sketchy. I read on. Douglas Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary gave the following explanation:

“floor of a building,” c.1400, from Anglo-L. historia “floor of a building” (c.1200), also “picture,” from L. historia (see history). Perhaps so called because the fronts of buildings in the Middle Ages often were decorated with rows of painted windows.

In a flash, I was taken back to my childhood when I would sit by my grandparents’ living room window with a pair of binoculars and try to make out the stories on the side of the Astoria Column. Built in the 1920s and modeled on Trajan’s Column in Rome, the Astoria Column stretches 125 feet high, with a spiraling mural that stretches more than 500 feet recording the history of the Oregon region from pre-Columbian times through the arrival of Lewis and Clark until the arrival of the railroad in the mid-1800s. You don’t get the benefit of the mural while climbing the spiral staircase inside the column. But it does give me a real physical sense to the word “storey.”

Happy New Year!