Traditional story

An anecdote is always presented as based on a real incident involving actual persons, whether famous or not, usually in an identifiable place; whether authentic or not, it has verisimilitude or truthiness.

Sometimes humorous, anecdotes are not jokes, because their primary purpose is not simply to evoke laughter, but to reveal a truth more general than the brief tale itself, or to delineate an institutional or character trait in such a light that it strikes in a flash of insight to the very essence.

Gradually, the term anecdote came to be applied[a] to any short tale utilized to emphasize or illustrate whatever point the author wished to make.

[b] An apologue or apolog (from the Greek ἀπόλογος, a "statement" or "account") is a brief fable or allegorical story with pointed or exaggerated details, meant to serve as a pleasant vehicle for a moral doctrine or to convey a useful lesson without stating it explicitly.

Well-known modern examples of this literary form include George Orwell's Animal Farm and the Br'er Rabbit stories derived from African and Cherokee cultures and recorded and synthesized by Joel Chandler Harris.

A parable is equally an ingenious tale intended to correct manners, but it can be true in the sense that "when this kind of actual event happens among men, this is what it means and this is how we should think about it", while an apologue, with its introduction of animals and plants, to which it lends ideas, language and emotions, contains only metaphoric truth: "when this kind of situation exists anywhere in the world, here is an interesting truth about it."

), and the lessons taught by the apologue seldom therefore reach beyond prudential morality (keep yourself safe, find ease where you can, plan for the future, do not misbehave or you'll eventually be caught and punished), whereas the parable aims at representing the relations between man and existence or higher powers (know your role in the universe, behave well towards all you encounter, kindness and respect are of higher value than cruelty and slander).

Still, in spite of the difference of moral level, Martin Luther thought so highly of apologues as counselors of virtue that he edited and revised Aesop and wrote a characteristic preface to the volume.

La Fontaine in France; Gay and Dodsley in England; Gellert, Lessing and Hagedorn in Germany; Tomas de Iriarte in Spain, and Krylov in Russia, are leading modern writers of apologues.

La Motte, writing at a time when this species of literature was universally admired, attributes its popularity to the fact that it manages and flatters amour-propre by inculcating virtue in an amusing manner without seeming to dictate or insist.

A work by P. Soullé, La Fontaine et ses devanciers (1866), is a history of the apologue from the earliest times until its final triumph in France.

Romances reworked legends, fairy tales, and history to suit the readers' and hearers' tastes, but by c.1600 they were out of fashion, and Miguel de Cervantes famously satirised them in his novel Don Quixote.

[4][5] They develop in oral traditions and therefore typically have multiple versions;[5] and they are the most common form of myth, found throughout human culture.

[6][7] In the society in which it is told, a creation myth is usually regarded as conveying profound truths, metaphorically, symbolically and sometimes even in a historical or literal sense.

[10][12] Also, all creation myths speak to deeply meaningful questions held by the society that shares them, revealing of their central worldview and the framework for the self-identity of the culture and individual in a universal context.

While Delphi is actually related to the word delphus ("womb"), many etiological myths are similarly based on folk etymology (the term "Amazon", for example).

In the Aeneid (published circa 17 BC), Vergil claims the descent of Augustus Caesar's Julian clan from the hero Aeneas through his son Ascanius, also called Iulus.

However, many cultures have stories set after the cosmogonic myth, which describe the origin of natural phenomena and human institutions within a preexisting universe.

In Western classical scholarship, the word aition (from the Ancient Greek αἴτιον, "cause") is sometimes used for a myth that explains an origin, particularly how an object or custom came into existence.

A fable differs from a parable in that the latter excludes animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors that assume speech and other powers of humankind.

The stories may nonetheless be distinguished from other folk narratives such as legends (which generally involve belief in the veracity of the events described)[20] and explicitly moral tales, including beast fables.

Folklore can be divided into four areas of study: artifact (such as voodoo dolls), describable and transmissible entity (oral tradition), culture, and behavior (rituals).

While ghost stories are often explicitly meant to be scary, they have been written to serve all sorts of purposes, from comedy to morality tales.

A practical joke or prank differs from a spoken one in that the major component of the humour is physical rather than verbal (for example placing salt in the sugar bowl).

Legend, for its active and passive participants includes no happenings that are outside the realm of "possibility", defined by a highly flexible set of parameters, which may include miracles that are perceived as actually having happened, within the specific tradition of indoctrination where the legend arises, and within which it may be transformed over time, in order to keep it fresh and vital, and realistic.

[26] A modern folklorist's professional definition of legend was proposed by Timothy R. Tangherlini in 1990:[27] Legend, typically, is a short (mono-) episodic, traditional, highly ecotypified[c] historicized narrative performed in a conversational mode, reflecting on a psychological level a symbolic representation of folk belief and collective experiences and serving as a reaffirmation of commonly held values of the group to whose tradition it belongs.

In the field of folkloristics, a myth is defined as a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form[30][31][32] and how customs, institutions and taboos were established.

[45] It is also distinct from the study of orality, which can be defined as thought and its verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population.

[46] A parable is[47] a succinct story, in prose or verse, that illustrates one or more moral, religious, instructive, or normative principles or lessons.

[52] As with all folklore and mythology, the designation suggests nothing about the story's veracity, but merely that it is in circulation, exhibits variation over time, and carries some significance that motivates the community in preserving and propagating it.