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new favorite PIE root just dropped. "story" is a shortened form of "history"! the root has meanings involving being a witness and giving testimony and traces back to "to see"! a story is an account of *something you saw*! also the shared root of "vision" and "wisdom"

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

· Jul 28

Replying to @visakanv

wow the etymology for "visa" is actually pretty wild, lots of stuff going on here

10:50 AM · Jul 28, 2022Twitter Web App

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

Jul 28

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@QiaochuYuan

feels related to this narrator-as-camera stuff

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

· Dec 22, 2021

the narrator-as-character is the link between reality and fiction, they're supposed to be what makes it possible for you to believe that the story really happened and a real person found out about it and is telling it to you now in the form of the book you're holding

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... which I suspect can be traced all the way back to the Sanskrit vidya - to see, hence Avidyā for "not seeing" as the root cause of suffering.

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Oh! That helps explain why the modern sense of history took so long to come by: who in their right mind would offer an account of something they *hadn't* seen?

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island owl

@cabowlogy

· Jul 1, 2021

I like to say history was invented only twice in history The first ~2,500 years from the invention of writing passed with, essentially, not a single person thinking to use it for history that we know of! Nonobvious indeed twitter.com/WilliamAEden/s…