In its most widespread meaning, the term fable refers to that fictional short story, written in prose or verse, which frequently has a didactic intention manifested in a moral. In fables, almost always, the characters par excellence are animals or objects that present and have some of the characteristics considered more human, such as speech and movement, among others..
That didactic intentionality that we mention and that stands out to the fable as one of its salient features, results from the use attributed to it and given in Greco-Roman antiquity, in which it was used by pedagogical slaves to teach the children that they had to educate, being paganism and its maxim about the impossibility of changing the natural condition of things, the first teaching that they offered to their “students”. Then, with the spread of Christianity and its more moral precepts, the fables also changed their teachings a bit and began to propose the possibility of a change in nature with moral judgment included. Already in the nineteenth century, the fable was remarkably widespread and became one of the literary genres with the most followers, a fact that contributed not only to the expansion of the topics about what they were dealing with, but also the first ones began to appear. specialized collections on them.
Among its main characteristics, we can summarize the following: moralizing or didactic content, there must always be a moral, which must be formulated at the end of it, a short text in which very few characters appear, creative, imaginative and with a lot of color both in the characters and in what counts, implausible and as a transmitter of vices and virtues, malicious and ironic enough to refer to them.
From the first to the present, many authors have stood out in the fable's metier, being Aesop, Babrio, Pedro Alfonso, Jean de la Fontaine, Ramón de Basterra, some of the most recognized.
On the other hand, the term fable is usually used in ordinary language when you want to give an account of a rumor or gossip and also to qualify those stories that are characterized by their falsehood or invention.
While, In some parts of the world, the word fable is also used when you want to highlight the spectacularity or the very out of the ordinary that something is, for example, a party, a place, among other issues.
