![]() ![]() ![]() This phrase is a reference to Rudyard Kipling's 1902 Just So Stories, containing fictional and deliberately fanciful tales for children, in which the stories pretend to explain animal characteristics, such as the origin of the spots on the leopard. A less pejorative term is a pourquoi story, which has been used to describe usually more mythological or otherwise traditional examples of this genre, aimed at children. Such tales are common in folklore genres like mythology (where they are known as etiological myths – see etiology). The pejorative nature of the expression is an implicit criticism that reminds the listener of the essentially fictional and unprovable nature of such an explanation. In science and philosophy, a just-so story is an untestable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. ![]()
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