Welcome to the Deep Dive. We are really glad
you're here today because our mission is to unpack
a single, honestly, incredibly ubiquitous phrase.
Yeah, it's a big one. It really is. It's a phrase
that you have heard since you were a child, probably
hardwired into your brain at this point. Well,
absolutely. But you rarely stop to think about
it as a functional piece of linguistic technology.
And that phrase is, once upon a time. Right,
because it operates as the ultimate scene setter.
Just hearing those four words, it immediately
changes your neurological expectations for what
is about to happen next. It's a signal. The signal
that you're departing from everyday reality.
Exactly. So to figure out how those four words
gain so much power, we are looking at a brilliantly
comprehensive Wikipedia article today. Yeah.
And this source, it details the history, the
global translations, and the modern variants
of this really iconic story starting phrase.
It covers a lot of ground. It does. Okay, let's
untack this. The history here goes back way further
than the glossy fairy tale books you might have
had on your shelf growing up. This... english
stock phrase has been used in storytelling since
at least the year 1380 which is an incredibly
long lifespan for a specific arrangement of words
language mutates constantly right yeah it evolves
but this sequence survived the transition from
middle english to early modern english almost
entirely intact and by the year 1600 it had really
become the standard narrative opener for english
stories it was the undisputed champion of starting
a tale And we have to establish the baseline
here to understand how this spread across the
globe, because Once Upon a Time became the absolute
go -to English translation for bringing European
fairy tales to the English -speaking world. Right,
because the translators had a huge problem. Exactly.
Translators were looking at Charles Perrault's
French stories, which opened with Il était une
fois, or Hans Christian Andersen's Danish tales,
starting with Der Weihrauchgang. Or The Brothers
Grimm with their German Es war einmal. Right.
They all faced the same issue. They needed a
recognizable brand for European folklore in the
English market, and they universally defaulted
to Once Upon a Time. It became the universal
translator for that specific kind of narrative
magic. And this is something I didn't know. These
stories didn't always have those sunny, neatly
tied up conclusions we expected. Yeah, they really
didn't. Originally, the English phrase didn't
pair up with happily ever after. Yeah. It was
paired with happily until their deaths. What's
fascinating here is how that subtle shift from
until their deaths to ever after changes the
entire psychological safety net of a fairy tale.
How so? Well think about it. When you tell a
child that the characters lived happily until
their deaths, you are grounding the fantasy in
the inescapable reality of the mortal world.
You're reminding the listener that despite winning
the battle or finding the treasure, mortality
is still undefeated. It leaves this sort of lingering
shadow over the victory. It really does. And
shifting that to ever after removes mortality
from the equation entirely. It elevates the characters
from mere mortals who got lucky into eternal
archetypes. They aren't just living out their
biological lives anymore. Right. They are frozen
in a state of permanent eternal happiness. It
completely changes the psychological function
of the story for the listener. It offers true
escapism rather than just a temporary reprieve
from medieval hardships. That makes total sense.
Looking at these historical variations, there
is a quote in our source from Joseph Jacobs.
It's from his 1893 collection, More English Fairy
Tales. Oh, the London Tramps variant. Yes. Jacobs
noted that the opening formulas didn't typically
have a lot of playful imagination in standard
English, but he highlighted this highly unique
variant used among London Tramps. They would
open their stories by saying, Once upon a time
and a very good time it was, though it wasn't
in my time, nor in your time, nor in anyone else's
time. That phrasing is almost poetic in its explicit
denial of the present moment. I mean, I want
you, the listener, to just imagine sitting around
a fire, maybe under a bridge in London in the
late 1800s, and hearing someone start a story
like that. It instantly transports you out of
your present reality. It acts as an overt declaration
of boundary crossing. And consider the socioeconomic
angle here. Marginalized people living in severe
poverty, they need a much thicker wall between
their harsh, freezing reality and the enclosed
space of the narrative than, say, a bourgeois
child sitting in a comfortable parlor. Right.
The storyteller is aggressively insisting that
the terrible present has no bearing on the world
they are about to enter. Here's where it gets
really interesting, though. If we step outside
of the English language entirely, cultures all
over the world signal the start or end of a story
using deeply bizarre, surreal animal imagery.
The animals are my favorite part of this. They
are so weird. In Kazakh storytelling, they start
with a phrase that directly translates to a long,
long time ago when goat's wool was gray. And
the source points out this actually carries the
meaning of an absurd concept, basically meaning
a long, long time ago when goats had feathers.
Yeah, feathered goats. And then you have the
traditional Korean opening, which is back when
tigers used to smoke tobacco. I just. What is
the mechanical purpose of bringing a smoking
tiger or a feathered goat into the first five
seconds of a story? It is a brilliant use of
deliberate absurdity. When you hear about a feathered
goat or a tiger lighting up a pipe, your brain
experiences immediate cognitive dissonance. It's
a structural signal to the listener that the
normal rules of reality, logic, and biology are
now officially suspended. You can't apply your
everyday logic to the story anymore. Exactly,
because we are already operating in a world where
tigers are participating in anachronistic human
habits. It forces you to drop your analytical
defenses and just accept the ride. And the animals
don't just start the stories. They abruptly end
them, too. Like in Dutch, stories often conclude
with a line, and then came an elephant with a
very long snout, and it blew the story out. Which
is a very literal metaphor. The story is a candle,
and the elephant extinguishes the flame, plunging
you back into the dark of the real world. Then
in Icelandic, they wrap things up with, a cat
in the bog put up his tail, and there ends the
fairy tale. Right. But my absolute favorite,
though, is the Bengali ending. The direct translation
is, my story ends and the spinach is eaten by
the goat. And I'm struggling to see the botanical
connection here. Why does a goat eating spinach
signify the end of a narrative arc? To understand
that, you really have to look at agricultural
reality. When a cow eats a plant, it grazes the
top, leaving the root system intact so the plant
can grow back. But when a goat eats an herb or
a leafy green like spinach, it eats the root.
It destroys the entire organism. So the spinach
is irreversibly gone. There is no coming back
from it. By saying the goat ate the spinach,
the storyteller is telling you with absolute
finality that the story has been entirely consumed.
It's over. Don't ask what happens next to the
hero or the villain because there is no root
left for a sequel to grow from. That is a polite
but incredibly firm way to tell the audience
to stop asking questions and go to sleep. Definitely.
And speaking of the audience, the source highlights
how many cultures explicitly acknowledge the
storyteller. and the listener, like three of
us in this conversation, at the very end of a
tale, they completely shatter the fourth wall.
Well, storytelling wasn't originally a passive
experience like watching a film in a dark theater.
It was a communal, interactive event. The narrator
and the audience were co -creating the atmosphere
in the room. There's this beautiful tradition
in Armenian and Turkish storytelling where the
tale ends with three apples falling from the
sky. And depending on who is telling the story,
the three apples are divided up in different
ways. Typically, one apple goes to the heroes
of the story, one goes to the writer or storyteller,
and the final apple falls to the listener. It
creates a shared inheritance. The magic of the
story isn't just kept by the fictional characters.
It's physically distributed to the people in
the room. It's a really lovely image. And in
a preliterate oral tradition, Storyteller relied
on the goodwill of the audience for survival,
perhaps literally hoping for a meal or a place
to sleep. Inserting themselves in the audience
into the reward system of the story is a subtle
psychological trick to bond the room together.
Turkish storytelling really seems to be the gold
standard for this kind of elaborate metanarrative.
Just look at this traditional Turkish comedy
opening. They start by saying once there was
and once there wasn't. In the long distant days
of yore, when haystacks winnowed sieves, when
genies played jurid in the old bathhouse, when
fleas were barbers, when camels were town triers,
and when I softly rocked my baby grandmother
to sleep in her creaking cradle. The sheer volume
of imagery there is relentless. It is a massive
tongue twister. Why overwhelm the listener with
that barrage of rhyming word plays and bizarre
situational juxtapositions right out of the gate?
It's about cognitive load. By overwhelming the
listener with paradoxes, rocking a baby grandmother,
fleas acting as barbers, you disorient them.
You overload their logical processing centers
so thoroughly that they have no choice but to
surrender to the whimsical stage you are setting.
It makes them highly receptive to the actual
plot that follows. If Turkish endings are whimsical,
the traditional Irish ending is wildly specific
and borderline hostile. Yes, the Irish endings
are something else. The storyteller ends the
tale by claiming they were actually inside the
story. They say the characters went by the ford,
but the storyteller took the stepping stones.
The characters drowned, but the storyteller survived.
And their reward for surviving. They were given
paper shoes and fat milk. A completely nonsensical,
useless reward for surviving a tragedy. Right.
And then they turn to the listener and say, as
I have this story today, may you have it 7 ,000
times better tomorrow. Which sounds lovely. Until
they add, may you only lose a pair of the incisors,
buy it five of the grinders and a fine strip
of the gum. Why would a storyteller casually
wish severe dental trauma on their audience?
If we connect this to the bigger picture. These
elaborate openings and endings, whether they
are wishing you lost teeth or giving you a metaphorical
apple, reveal that these tales are deeply transactional.
They acknowledge the pact between the speaker
and the listener. The dental trauma is part of
the pact. The Irish curse is a dark comedic warning
about the weight of carrying a story. You see
this transactional nature vividly in the Nepali
tradition too. The narrator ends with a rhyme
granting a golden garland to the listener. and
a flower garland to the narrator, before explicitly
promising that the story will go to heaven and
come back fresh on the lips of the next narrator.
They are handing the baton to the listener. You
are no longer just an audience member. You are
the next custodian of the story. They are actively
trying to ensure the oral tradition survives
the night. It is a medieval chain letter. Pass
the story on or suffer the consequences. And
the scale of these stories is massive, especially
when you look at Eastern European cultures. Our
source points out a fascinating use of geographic
hyperbole to set the scene. In Czech, Slovak,
Polish, and Estonian tales, they don't just say,
a long time ago. They set the scene by saying
the story takes place beyond nine mountain ranges,
nine rivers, and nine woods. They are pushing
the narrative into a completely unreachable geography.
Consider the mental map of a 14th century peasant.
If you have never left your village, the concept
of crossing nine separate mountain ranges is
effectively pushing the story into another dimension.
It's the spatial equivalent of before time began.
Hungary takes that spatial displacement even
further. A Hungarian variant involves crossing
seven countries, going through the Sea of Operencia,
traversing the Glass Mountains, just to reach
the place where the curly -tailed pig delves.
The Sea of Apparencia is a brilliant cultural
placeholder for the absolute edge of the known
world. It accomplishes massive world -building
in a single sentence, confirming that no one
in the room could possibly travel to verify the
events of the tale. And if you survive traveling
past those glass mountains and the curly -tailed
pig, your reward is usually a massive feast.
Different cultures end their tales with very
specific menus. In Spanish, the characters live
happily and eat partridges. In Catalan, they
eat candies. Which speaks directly to the caloric
anxiety of the era. In a world plagued by frequent
famine and food insecurity, the ultimate fantasy
isn't necessarily eternal life or political power.
It's simply a full stomach. The highest reward
a storyteller could offer their characters was
a guaranteed meal. The Lithuanian ending handles
that feast in a very specific way. The storyteller
inserts themselves into the celebration and claims
they drank mead ale that dribbled through my
beard, had not in my mouth. It's the ultimate
tease. The storyteller gets to witness the feast,
the drink spills on their face, but they don't
actually get to taste the magic. It separates
the narrator from the divine luck of the heroes,
reminding the audience that both the storyteller
and the listener are going to wake up hungry
tomorrow. When they are talking about food. A
lot of cultures resort to rhythmic nonsense to
close the book. The pharaohs in Norwegian tales
sign off with Snipsnapsnow or Snipsnapsnoot.
Spanish tales use Colorin, Colorado, which essentially
just means redhead red, but it rhymes perfectly
with the word for finished. In classical Arabic,
they close with Tutatuta, the story is over.
The source notes that tuta literally means berry,
but in this context, it has zero actual semantic
meaning. It is used purely for the musical rhythm.
These nonsense rhymes act as an auditory palate
cleanser. Think about the neurological impact
of rhythmic dissonance. When you are listening
to a story, you enter a slight trance state.
You really do. The sudden introduction of a bouncing
phonetic closure like snip snap snout acts as
a psychological grounding technique. It breaks
the trance. It's the verbal equivalent of snapping
your fingers to wake someone up from hypnosis,
signaling that the narrative spell is broken.
That brings us perfectly to the modern variant.
section of the Wikipedia page. While we've been
dissecting the 1380s London tramps and ancient
Bengali roots, this mechanism isn't dead. Pop
culture has taken this ancient architectural
framework and evolved it to fit new mediums,
and it is entirely relevant to the media you
and I consume today. The core architecture of
once upon a time is still actively holding up
our biggest modern myths. Look at the biggest
sci -fi franchise in the world. Star Wars opens
with a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
It is the exact same formula relying on the spatial
displacement of the 14th century, just swapping
out the nine mountains and nine rivers of Eastern
Europe for a distant galaxy. George Lucas understood
that to make a modern, cynical audience accept
space wizards and laser swords, he couldn't rely
on hard science fiction tropes. He needed to
trigger that specific fairytale suspension of
disbelief right at the opening frame. He used
an ancient linguistic key to unlock a modern
door. It is used heavily for satire and comedy,
too. Mystery Science Theater 3000 opens with
In the Not -Too -Distant Future next Sunday,
A .D. The movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World opens
by saying, not so long ago, in the mysterious
land of Toronto, Canada. By placing a mundane,
highly documented location like Toronto into
the grand, mythical framing of a mysterious land,
you immediately signal to the audience that they
are entering a heightened satirical reality.
The juxtaposition does all the heavy lifting
for the tone of the entire film. We see temporal
displacement constantly in literature and music
as well. Don McLean singing a long, long time
ago to open American Pie or Charles Dickens kicking
off A Tale of Two Cities with it was the best
of times, it was the worst of times. The underlying
psychology remains identical across all these
mediums. The human brain craves a definitive,
recognizable threshold to cross over into a narrative
state. We need to be told precisely when to leave
the real world. And just as importantly, with
the elephants blowing out candles and cats and
bogs, we need to be told when it is safe to come
back. So what does this all mean? When we look
at the scope of this information, it's clear
that while you might think of Once Upon a Time
as just a tired cliche printed in children's
books, it's actually the tip of a massive, rich,
global linguistic tradition. From Kazakh goats
with feathers to Korean tigers smoking tobacco
to three Armenian apples falling from the sky,
humanity has spent centuries designing these
elaborate sensory signals for one simple purpose,
to spark our collective imagination and give
us permission to dream. This raises an important
question, though. We have tracked how Once Upon
a Time evolved from the spoken fireside tales
of the 1380s to the opening crawls of blockbuster
sci -fi movies. It successfully adapted to fit
printing presses and silver screens. But right
now we're entering a totally new era of immersive
virtual reality, spatial computing and AI generated
narratives. As the medium shifts again, what
bizarre brand new stock phrase or perhaps what
new sensory signal will our culture invent next?
What is going to be the once upon a time that
tells the next generation of listeners that they
are about to leave the physical world entirely
behind? That is such a fascinating thought to
leave on. The spatial computing equivalent of
a smoking tiger might be a specific haptic feedback
pulse, or a universal VR chime that triggers
that same cognitive dissonance. We will have
to wait and see. Thank you for taking this deep
dive with us today. Keep asking questions, keep
looking for those hidden architectural structures
in the stories you love, and we will catch you
next time.