Is a "Tale" less factual than a "Story"?
I am preparing a press release, and so far the headline of the press release is:
A SOVIET LABOR CAMP SURVIVOR’S TALE
A colleague called the word "tale" into question, since this is a book about a person's actual experiences in a Soviet labor camp. She feels that "tale" would be more appropriate for something fictional, whereas "story" should be used in this case. I'm not so sure "tale" is less appropriate for the situation, and on top of that, it sounds better.
Anyone have any good reasons for believing "story" is better than "tale"?
There indeed is a contra-factual connotation to tale – perhaps due to its long-standing collocation and association with fictious narrative. cf. "fisherman's tale."
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The ODO has as one of the definitions of story as:
3 An account of past events in someone’s life or in the development of something: the story of modern farming the film is based on a true story
3.1 A particular person’s representation of the facts of a matter: during police interviews, Harper changed his story [emphasis added]
which is not in the definition of tale:
1A fictitious or true narrative or story, especially one that is imaginatively recounted
1.1 A lie.
A story can be false but a tale seldom true, it seems.
What we have here is therefore, a story, not a tale.
Offhand, I would have thought that tale carried a connotation of a story with a moral (fictional) whereas story related an event. However "survivor's story of the holocaust" gets about 185,000 results on googling, whereas "survivor's tale of the holocaust" gets about 400,000 results. (Some of that reflects on a book with that title.) "true story" holocaust: 842,000 hits; "true tale" holocaust: 298,000.
The dictionary definition doesn't help much.
Words associated with tale which imply falsehood include tall tale, folk tale, fairy tale, whereas cock-and-bull story implies a false story, but a sob story can be true or false.
I am the world's worst ngram user but here's one anyway:
I can't give you a solid reason for it, but I think story is probably more associated with truth than tale is.