"Looking for the candy, finding a back story" was the headline above a review by A.O. Scott in the New York Times about the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
"Backstory" (one word) was the headline chosen by the New Yorker cultural critic Joan Acocella for her dance review of "revivals of long-absent works by Ashton and Balanchine."
"Allende brandishes hero's back story in her `Zorro,'" headlined the Albuquerque Journal over a book review by Frank Zoretich of Isabel Allende's Zorro - a Novel, a prequel covering the years when "the masked swordsman acquired his injustice-fighting skills." (Swordsman, in its original sense, denoted a male who carried an actual sword.)
What's the history, derivation, hidden motivation or inside skinny -- I'm groping for the dramatic term -- of this explosion of usage in the arts sections of our media? Whence this seemingly simultaneous lexical development?
It began quietly in the early 1980s, probably among writers creating series for television. The Oxford English Dictionary's (OED) earliest citation is from an AP dispatch by Jerry Buck in 1982 about the screenwriters Stephen and Elinor Karpf: "They had been compiling characters and back stories for a prospective serial for several years." The OED recently noted that the term's early specific meaning was a history "created for a fictional character or situation, especially in a film or television series."
When dealing with a fictional character, the writer and director can help an actor play the part by telling him about the character's life before the screenplay begins: from where he came, his education or lack of it, previous loves, arrest and medical records; this provides motivation and flavor.
A second meaning of back story grew out of that: Why not provide the reader or viewer with the same kind of information about what drives the character's decisions and that adds color and meaning to an event? That led to the popularity of the prequel, a 1970s term popularized by J.R.R. Tolkien, giving the characters an earlier life and showing the roots of the subsequent story's events.
Then nonfiction writers adopted the word and applied it to the lives of real people of the past. David Barnhart, editor of the Barnhart Dictionary Companion, spotted what he calls "a figurative extension of the meaning" and supplies a 1986 citation in this book title: Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age, edited by Pat McGilligan. (Unfortunately for etymologists, no interviewer asked the early screenwriters if they ever used the word backstory.)
That secondary sense -- "what happened back then" -- is being carried forward. The Baltimore Sun reporter Fred Rasmussen, who has a weekly column titled Back Story, says: "What we're doing is going back to an original story from the '20s and '30s, sometimes only 10 years ago, and updating it for readers. We may know now what or who caused it, and what the motivations were. It's not a nostalgia column; it's a revisiting of a news event. We chose the name because we wanted something clipped, and that reflected what the column was about."
Other lexies have their eyes on the two words (that are sometimes written as one). Joe Pickett, executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, supplies us with Tapir's Morning Bath, a 2002 nature book by Elizabeth Royte: "Whalers took out whales, plankton proliferated, pollack boomed, perch and herring went bust, seals and sea lions followed, and so orcas switched their diet to otter." Then comes a nice boosting: "As the disappearing otter has a back story, so too does it have a front story, a cascade of effects rippling into the future."
Bringing the varied usages close to home, the Times Magazine has a section on its contents page called "Back Story." Here's the meaning, in the opinion of Gerald Marzorati, the magazine's editor: "My understanding is that the phrase is mostly (though not exclusively) used in Hollywood to describe the potted history and biography of, respectively, the narrative and the characters that will have to be worked into the film -- carefully, as not to bog down the unfolding of the edge-of-the-seat stuff that moviegoers have paid their 10-plus bucks for.
"We at the magazine use it on our contents page mostly because of the catchiness of the phrase. What we mean to do in that paragraph is give you a little `back story' on the author -- why he or she was the one to have reported and written the piece -- and a little `back story' on how the reporting came about or went." (He can give the section a catchy title, but the guys in the office, and at many other magazines, call it the edlet, for "editor's letter.")
That's the background, to use an archaic term, of back story.
"I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency," US Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN's Larry King. After his choice of a word drew some hooting from critics of the war in Iraq, Cheney defended his usage: "If you look at what the dictionary says about `throes,' it can be a violent period, the throes of a revolution."
I don't look at dictionaries; I call lexicographical sources. Andrew Sparks, supervising editor of Webster's New World Dictionary, finds no fault with Cheney's definition, saying, "A revolution is a problematic situation where a real struggle is going on."
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld waded in weeks later: "Last throes could be a violent last throe, just as well as a placid or calm last throe. Look it up in the dictionary."
Again, I dutifully did my thing: "There is no such thing as a placid last throe," asserts Sparks, with no equivocation. A single throe is a pang or spasm of pain; plural throes mean "struggle," ranging from decision-making to childbirth, but the last in last throes has the same connotation as in last rites. Sorry, Rummy; as my dentist says, that's a bridge too far.
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