This Is Where the Word 'History'

Comes From

General view of the Long Room in the Trinity College Library, the largest library in Ireland on
April 19, 2016 in Dublin.

Vincent Isore—Getty Images

BY KATY STEINMETZ

UPDATED: JUNE 23, 2017 1:45 PM ET | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: JUNE 23, 2017 10:37 AM EDT

A merican inventor Henry Ford famously said that history is “more or less bunk.”
Others have characterized history differently: as the essence of innumerable
biographies, as a picture of human crimes and misfortunes, as nothing but an
agreed upon fable, as something that is bound to repeat itself.

It’s hard to define such a monumental thing without grappling with the tensions
between what is fact and what is fiction, as well as what was included and what was
left out. So it’s only fitting that those tensions are wrapped up in the history of the
word itself.
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. The
Greek word historia originally meant inquiry, the act of seeking knowledge, as well
as the knowledge that results from inquiry. 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 words story and history share much of their lineage, and in previous eras, the
overlap between them was much messier than it is today. “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. Stories are fanciful
tales woven at bedtime, the plots of melodramatic soap operas. That word can even
be used to describe an outright lie. Histories, on the other hand, are records of
events. That word refers to all time preceding this very moment and everything that
really happened up to now.

The distinction is still messier than that, of course. 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. And plenty of stories defy easy categorization one way or the other.
Take the notion of someone telling their side of a story. To them, that account might
be as correct as any note about a president’s birthplace. To someone else, that
account might be as incorrect as the notion that storks deliver babies. 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.

As 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. 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.

That is why feminists, for example, rejected the word history and championed the
notion of herstory during the 1970s, says Dictionary.com’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. And some critics pointed that out back in the 1970s, saying that the
invention of herstory showed ignorance about where the word comes from. But
sociolinguist Ben Zimmer says there’s evidence that the feminists knew as much at
the time. And more importantly, the fact that it sounds plausible that there would
be a link can still tell us something.

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. 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. 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.

“The narrative element has always been there,” Zimmer says. In some ways, the
apocryphal tale about how history came to describe accounts of the past “plays on
what has been hiding in that word all along.”

Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly described the origins of
the words “history” and “inquiry.” They do not share the same root.

WRITE TO KATY STEINMETZ AT KATY.STEINMETZ@TIME.COM.