Word Watch: Storied
The word "storied" has retained indelible poetic associations.
“For Bibliophiles, a subscription to one of London’s most storied booksellers builds the private library of dreams” - headline in The Blend magazine, December 2024
“Storied” is not a word we encounter too often these days I think. What exactly does it mean here? Is the bookseller well known for selling storybooks? More likely, I suspect, is a suggestion that the shop itself is well known. But that is certainly not what “storied” has been taken to mean in the past. To me, the word immediately recalls one very famous quotation from the mid-eighteenth century:
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Or flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
Thomas Gray, in his Elegy written in a Country Churchyard (1751), though preoccupied with the graves in the churchyard, is surveying the apparently more permanent monuments in the church itself: the carved stone bust, and the inscribed memorial urn, cannot, he says, bring back to life the people they commemorate.
The “story” on the urn is no substitute for the reality of the dead person it refers to. The dictionary sharpens the meaning usefully: it explains that “storied” means “associated with stories or legends”. I deduce from this that the journalist responsible for the citation I began with considers the bookshop in question to be the stuff of legends, or the subject of imaginative narratives. More probably, the writer wants to convey the idea that the shop is well known, and perhaps very well known, which is how I interpreted it first. How disappointing!
The problem is, that Gray’s use of “storied” rather drowns out this attempt to apply the word in a modern context. It’s not a term that has been part of standard speech in this century, nor, I think, in the last, so it has retained indelible poetic associations, and sounds affected or even pretentious when hijacked for everyday use.