A “tall tale” is a fiction; a fanciful yarn that might be about anything from the abominable snowman you saw in last week’s snowstorm to the fantastic exploits of Paul Bunyan, the giant woodsman of US legend. But what makes it “tall?”
The phrase “tall tale” probably comes from one of the older meanings of “tall” — and there have been quite a few of them over the centuries. “Tall” probably originated in Old English, and at first had nothing to do with height; it meant prompt.
By the 1300s, “tall” no longer had anything to do with being prompt; it meant proper or decent. Then century later, in 1450, the phrase “On of the tallest younge men of this parysch…” wasn’t talking about decency — by then “tall” meant handsome.
Peeking in after another century went by, we can see that by 1577, “tall” had yet another new meaning: “If he can kil a man,..he is called a tall man, and a valiant man of his hands.” If you were “tall” in those days, it meant you were strong and skilled in combat. Notice the last bit, “valiant man of his hands?” That evolved into “tall of his hands,” as in “Agrippa being a tall man of his handes.” This could still mean a formidable combatant, but it could also simply mean skilled at a given craft. From there, in the early 1600s we get to “Goe stand to it; shew thyselfe a tall man of thy tongue.” Now we’re getting somewhere; “tall of thy tongue” meant skilled at speech. That begins to sound like it’s related to telling a “tall tale”.
But after that, “tall” took another turn in meaning. As this quote from 1697 suggests, by then “tall” had become associated with height: “Fair Galathea,..Tall as a Poplar, taper as the Bole.” After that, having finally found a meaning it was comfortable with, “tall” settled down and kept more or less the same meaning. By 1861, in fact, it was getting pretty specific indeed: “A man..is called tall when he is above 5.754 feet in height.” Didn’t know people were being measured to the nearest thousandths in 1861, did you?
But while “tall” was maintaining its association with height, it still retained a figurative meaning related back to the “tall of thy tongue” phrase centuries earlier. By the 1860s it was no longer closely associated with anyone’s tongue, but went straight to speech itself: “What the Yankees call ‘tall talk’.”
“Tall talk” was at first the kind of grandiloquent oration that seems to have been the rule among speechmakers of the time, but during the 1800s “tall” shows up in a number of informal phrases suggesting something that’s a bit too exaggerated to be taken at face value: “The season, so far, had been dry, and favourable for tall scoring.” Also: “We were a pretty tall time coming that last fifteen mile.” Not to mention: “It’s a tall order, but it’s worth trying, isn’t it?”
And finally, by 1891, the New York Times was printing references to “A tall yarn…”
There is, by the way, a theory that the “tall” associated with height has always been a different word from the “tall” with all the other meanings. The height-related “tall”, according to this theory, originated in Welsh. But there isn’t much evidence for this; it’s probably just tall talk.
