Word Etymology - Deception

Deception is necessary in magic, and in many cases storytelling and I have always found that very interesting. From an early age my mother began telling me I was a wonderful storyteller, she'd hear the lid close on the cookie jar from across the house and yell "are you getting in the cookie jar?" My mother must have had ears to rival Dumbo's cause I was very quiet. I would bound up the stairs with a fist full of cookies yelling "No mom, I'm upstairs, something must have fallen in the kitchen." Storytelling and deception, they are closely related in many ways and we all learn both of them to some degree at an early age. But deception seems to have a different tone and is somehow different then lying.

Deception is a stem of the Latin word 'decipere' which is word we get "deceive" from. The word 'decipere' means "to ensnare, take in" and comes from de - meaning 'from' and capere - meaning 'to take.' So literally to deceive someone is to take something from them, presumably the truth.

What it means to storytelling: Storytellers like magicians take the truth from their audience, not stealing it but rather exchanging it for something else. The audience willingly participates in this exchange and it is assumed that there is deception taking place. The interesting thing about storytelling is that it can work in the opposite order as well. We can take the lies that our audience have been taught and exchange them for truth. So there is a very interesting choice that storyteller must make between deception and correction when telling. I am not saying that one is more valid than the other or morally objectionable (in most cases except for things such as seances, fortune tellings, and spiritual healings where charlatans, and storytellers in their own right cheat people out of money) but it is still a decision each storyteller must make.