THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LITERARY ANECDOTES
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loginINTRODUCTION
The urge to exchange anecdotes is as deeply implanted in human beingsas the urge to gossip. It is hard to believe that cavemen didn’t practisetheir skills as anecdotalists as they sat around the fire. The word ‘anec-dote’ itself, on the other hand, was imported into the English languagecomparatively late in the day. Elizabethans and Jacobeans, Roundheadsand Cavaliers all seem to have got by without it. It didn’t make itsappearance in England until the second half of the seventeenth century,after the Restoration, and even then it took a generation or two to estab-lish itself in the full modern sense. It is a word that comes, via French,from the Greek. It originally meant ‘something unpublished’, and firstachieved regular literary status when the Byzantine historian Procopiusapplied it, in the plural, to his ‘secret history’ of the reign of the EmperorJustinian, a confidential and often scandalous chronicle of life at theimperial court.
