Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 December 21

= December 21 =

New narrative meaning
Many online dictionaries have a separate meaning for “narrative” stressing some or all of the following: bias, point of view, deceptiveness, politics, role of media. At wiktionary this would be the meaning #3, noun. Older dictionaries don’t seem to have similar separate meanings, there’s also a legal technical meaning with a connotation of objectivity. I have the impression that this use is quite new. The oldest example from dictionaries I was able to date was from 2012 (Michael Grunwald, One Nation On Welfare. Living Your Life On The Dole, Time Magazine: “The rise of the Tea Party and the weakness of the Obama economy have fueled a Republican narrative about Big Government as a threat to liberty”) and seems to present already all the characteristics of modern usage. A similar meaning with a more neutral connotation has its place in disciplines like psychology, sociology and similar, history seems also promising for finding possible precedents and there may be a lot of grey areas. I’m asking if there was a significant shift in meaning/usage in recent times and for insights about when/where/how it took place and events or works that may have played a significant role. Examples are likely to be about divisive topics, needless to say, I’m not interested in a debate about them. --176.247.148.123 (talk) 21:08, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
 * In a Word History item on the Merriam–Webster site relating the history of the term spin dictor, I find the following sentence: A couple centuries later [after Chaucer, --L.], spin was used for telling or fabricating a narrative (as in "spinning fantastic tales") and then the art of drawing out or protracting a discourse ("negotiations were spun out at great length"). Published in 2018, this makes a direct link between fabrication and narrative, yet (I think), while not using the term narrative in a new sense. After all, it is also the object in telling ... a narrative. An older collocation of spin and narrative is from an article published in 1984 in Wired: In the field, reps construct a story that makes sense of the diagnostic data - they spin a narrative that explains the symptoms. I happen to believe that all narratives are a fabric woven as a seemingly coherent ensemble from pieces of thread spun from snippets available to the weaver, whether emerging from their fruitful imagination or their best attempt at recollection. So then it is not really a new sense. The prevalence of fabricators with an agenda – or our awareness of their presence behind the scenes – is a relatively new phenomenon that colours the spectrum of applicable uses of the term.  --Lambiam 23:01, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
 * It is true that the examples you gave did not cross the line of entering into a new sense, and that they also fit the OP's description. It does seem to me that a new sense of the word has emerged, though; and I think the examples you gave were a usage that acted as  a linking node of sorts, from which the new sense arose.
 * In your examples, although some additional (arguaby-) connotations were attached to the word, they were were describing narratives in the traditional definition.
 * However, in recent years, it seems that connotated meaing of the word, along with the word itself, has started seeing application to other types of things which are NOT narratives by the traditional definition; e.g., dialogues, discourses, often in some line of highly abstract sense.
 * i hope that made at least some sense.. :) 2600:1702:4960:1DE0:F1ED:C01C:3051:CF8B (talk) 23:53, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the examples and the textile analogy. The line between what is a new meaning and what is not can be quite blurry and I agree it's not clear if it should be drawn in this case, the differencies in usage frequency can be attributed to changes in the focus of public discourse. Meanwhile I found this, with some nice graphs pointing to the middle 80' in the USA. The answer seems based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English, so I'm not sure how much it supports an american origin rather than presuppose it, but Lambian's example from Wired fits the same model. Paul Ricœur's Time and Narrative (Temps et Récit) seems to be from the same time and was swiftly translated in English, no idea how influential it was (especially for jurnalistic language) and words have a life of their own, so any similar attempt at finding a single "culprit" is going to be somewhat flawed. My curiosity came mostly from the fact that such use was recently borrowed to Italian, the use in English seems a lot older and the shift smoother. 176.247.148.123 (talk) 00:00, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Bonus: some random words with a similarly overlapping meaning (weaving/story-telling/conspiring): Latin textus, Italian trama/tramare an naturally English plot. Guess the list could easily get a lot longer. 176.247.148.123 (talk) 00:59, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Surely what is distinctive about the "Republican narrative" is that they are not constructing a new story, but proposing a new or specific meaning for an existing (and not necessarily disputed) story. Therefore a single set of agreed events forming a fixed story may nonetheless be interpreted into the "Republican narrative", the "Liberal narrative", or the "left-wing narrative", and many more. Narrative in this sense has ceased to be the story, and become the political bias that the teller is propounding. --Verbarson talkedits 22:42, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Some other words that may be used in similar contexts, propaganda or ideology come to mind, seem pretty loaded and more easily linked to straighforward lies and/or less subtle approaches, assuming intention or not ("narrative" may already be pretty loaded too, but seems more linked to factually true events, lie by omission and similar). The facts that the way you tell a story requires some not trivial choises that can have a bigger effect than the presented events by themselves and that this effect can be misused have been long known in narratology, other disciplines and popular culture, but may have come more to the spotlight and explicitly addressed in more recent times. In the case of "plot" I guess most English native speakers would easily recognize two different meanings, for "narrative" I expect a lot more disagreement, which makes the case interesting (some speakers recognizing a different meaning while other contemporary ones are percieving it as just a particular use of a more general one doesn't seem to be an unlikely situation), I guess time will tell. "Narratives" are also more about specific events rather than wordviews, something that I (willfully) omitted.109.119.244.41 (talk) 23:09, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Maybe also see Truthiness. --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:43, 22 December 2021 (UTC)