![]() But then in fairness, I was probably influenced by the extended use, particularly in evolutionary biology, of the term ‘just-so story’ to describe a hypothesis which purports to explain – without evidence – how a particular cultural or biological trait came into being. ![]() I may have been in the minority in making this mistake. So at last they came to be like charms, all three of them – the whale tale, the camel tale, and the rhinoceros tale.’ They had to be told just so or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence. As Kipling later wrote of them, ‘in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. But no: it’s only now I realise that they’re ‘just so’ stories because Kipling’s daughter Josephine (known as ‘Effie’), to whom he told many of these tales as bedtime stories, insisted that her father tell the stories to her ‘just so’, or in exactly the words she was used to. ![]() Until now, I’d always laboured under the belief that these tales were called Just So Stories because they’re about things being the way they are: it’s ‘just so’ that leopards have spots, camels have humps, and so on. ![]()
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