When you hear the word story, what comes to mind? You might imagine bedtime stories, told or read by a parent or loved one. In a literate culture, story is as likely to be in the form of a book as it is an oral art. In American Sign Language, the sign for story is connected to narrate or describe. Book is an entirely different sign. In ASL, where storytelling has an important role in transmitting culture as well as entertainment, the whole body is used. Stories are told with hands, but also with expressions. Storytelling is far from reading a book. Read is demonstrated by a v shape moving down the palm, similar to eyes scanning a page. Story uses the mouth and the body.
For biblical and other storytellers, this difference is both an encouragement and a reminder to continue to reclaim the tradition of oral (or face-to-face) communication and not simply to refer to a printed resource.