The stories we tell — if they bear repeating — become, at some point, a palimpsest: memory upon memory. We forget. We embroider. We omit. We smooth troubles into wry recollection and twist the banal into amusing anecdotes. We are a species of unreliable narrators.

Here are a few of those in picture and/or words in the old family OED I’ve been lugging around for a lifetime.