Myths are usually set in a remote past with characters such as gods and goddesses who have extraordinary powers. Myths often include origin stories explaining such mysteries as how the world was formed. Folktales occur in an imaginary time and place and are peopled by fairies, princesses, magic helpers, and talking animals. Legends are stories told as true in which the action purportedly happens to real people in real places in the recent past. Anecdotes, tall tales, numbskull stories, and modern joke cycles are often humorous in content and function in part as entertainment.
Ballads function as stories in song.
Like legends, they are often based on historic events or people. Oral histories bring together personal experience stories about a person's life, family history, occupation, social and economic era. The spoken word, as the province of each of us, is layered with semantic symbols and narrative styles, the linguistic legacy of distinct regional and cultural communities. The boasting, toasts, and dozens of Black Americans, for instance, are examples of complicated systems of spontaneous invention and memorization skillfully brought into play within the boundaries of formal linguistic rules. Occupational narrative is illustrated by oral narratives of working cowboys.