Beth Ohlsson - etimology 15-22

15. tall tale
A fanciful or greatly exaggerated story, as in Some youngsters love tall tales about creatures from outer space coming to earth. This idiom uses tall in the sense of "exaggerated." [Mid-1800s]

tall

"high in stature," 1530, probably ult. from O.E. getæl "prompt, active." Sense evolved to "brave, valiant, seemly, proper" (c.1400), then to "attractive, handsome" (c.1450), and finally "being of more than average height."

16. emcee
1933, abbrev. of master of ceremonies.
Master of Ceremonies Origin: 1655–65

a person who directs the entertainment at a party, dinner, nightclub, radio or television broadcast, or the like, acting as host and introducing the speakers or performers.

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17. combinatorial - per David Novak. An approach to a storytelling program in which the teller intuituively knows the right story to tell this audience for the right reason. A teller draws on a body of work, reads the audience, considers the parameters within which s/he has been contracted, and choses the program, linking each story to the previous one. The program is shaped by the relationship the teller creates w/the audience and is adjusted as deemed necessary and appropriate. The term comes from mathematics; origins cited below. What follows certainly sounds like the way David's brain works.

combinatorics or combinatorial analysis, sometimes called the science of counting, the branch of mathematics concerned with the selection, arrangement, and operation of elements within sets. Combinatorial theory deals with existence (does a particular arrangement exist?), enumeration (how many such arrangements are there?) and structure (what are the properties of each arrangement?). It has applications in such diverse areas as managing computer and telecommunication networks, predicting poker hands, dividing tasks among workers, and finding a pair of socks in a drawer. Because combinatorics deals with concrete problems by limiting itself to finite collections of discrete objects, as opposed to the more common, continuous mathematics, it has neither standard algebraic manipulations nor a systematic problem-solving framework. Instead it relies upon the logical analysis of possibilities for each new problem, breaking the problem into a series of steps and substeps. Combinatorics has its roots in the 17th- and 18th-century attempts to analyze the odds of winning at games of chance. The advent of computers in the 20th cent. made possible the high-speed calculation required to analyze the multitude of possibilities inherent in a combinatorial approach to large-scale statistical testing and analysis. Branches of combinatorics include graph theory and combinations and permutations.

See A. Slomson, An Introduction to Combinatorics (1991); A. Tucker, Applied Combinatorics (3d ed. 1994); R. A. Brualdi, Introductory Combinatorics (3d ed. 1997); M. Hall, Combinatorial Theory (2d ed. 1998); R. P. Stanley, Enumerative Combinatorics (1999).

18. Celtic: My heritage, and the first folktales I learned to tell. My mother is of British descent, my father Scots-Irish.
noun

1.	a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, including esp. Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton, which survive now in Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, Wales, and Brittany. Abbreviation: Celt

–adjective

2.	of the Celts or their languages.

1607, from L. Celta, singular of Celtæ, from Gk. Keltoi, Herodotus' word for the Gauls (who were also called Galatai). Used by the Romans of continental Gauls but apparently not of the British Celtic tribes. Celtic twilight is from Yeats's name for his collection of adapted Irish folk tales (1893).
19. fable–noun

1.	a short tale to teach a moral lesson, often with animals or inanimate objects as characters; apologue: the fable of the tortoise and the hare; Aesop's fables.

2.	a story not founded on fact: This biography is largely a self-laudatory fable.

3.	a story about supernatural or extraordinary persons or incidents; legend: the fables of gods and heroes.

4.	legends or myths collectively: the heroes of Greek fable.

5.	an untruth; falsehood: This boast of a cure is a medical fable.

6.	the plot of an epic, a dramatic poem, or a play.

7.	idle talk: old wives' fables. Origin: 1250–1300; ME fable, fabel, fabul < class="ital-inline">fābula a story, tale, equiv. to fā(rī) to speak + -bula suffix of instrument

20. visualize: verb form of visual. 1412, "coming from the eye or sight" (as a beam of light), from L.L. visualis "of sight," from L. visus "sight," from visus, pp. of videre "to see" (see vision). Meaning "relating to vision" is first attested 1603. The noun meaning "photographic film or other visual display" is first recorded 1951. Visualize (1817) is first attested in, and perhaps was coined by, Coleridge.

21. imagination. noun

1.	the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.

2.	the action or process of forming such images or concepts.

3.	the faculty of producing ideal creations consistent with reality, as in literature, as distinct from the power of creating illustrative or decorative imagery. Compare fancy (def. 2).

4.	the product of imagining; a conception or mental creation, often a baseless or fanciful one.

5.	ability to face and resolve difficulties; resourcefulness: a job that requires imagination.

6.	Psychology. the power of reproducing images stored in the memory under the suggestion of associated images (reproductive imagination) or of recombining former experiences in the creation of new images directed at a specific goal or aiding in the solution of problems (creative imagination).

7.	(in Kantian epistemology) synthesis of data from the sensory manifold into objects by means of the categories.

8.	Archaic. a plan, scheme, or plot.

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Origin:
1300–50; ME < class="ital-inline">imāginātiōn- (s. of imāginātiō) fancy, equiv. to imāgināt(us) ptp. of imāginārī to imagine (imāgin-, s. of imāgō image + -ātus -ate ¹ ) + -iōn- -ion

22. Muse: c.1374, protectors of the arts, from L. Musa, from Gk. Mousa, lit. "muse, music, song," from PIE root *mon-/*men-/*mn- "to think, remember" (see mind (n.)). The names of the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (q.v.), and their specialties are traditionally: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (love poetry, lyric art), Euterpe (music, especially flute), Melpomene (tragedy), Polymnia (hymns), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy), Urania (astronomy).