fond

Stella (the dog) and Erik (the cat) are fond of one another

3 October 2025

The modern adjective fond refers to the quality of having affection, liking, or eagerness for someone or something. But this was not always so. In Middle English fonned could mean foolish or stupid. The verb fonnen meant to be foolish or misguided or to fool or make a fool of someone, and the modern fond comes from the past participle of that verb, fonned. The word fun comes from the same root, and in early use could mean a fraud or deception or, as a verb, to cheat. And the modern verb to fondle is derived from the verb fonnen, appearing in the sixteenth century.

We don’t know where fond comes from; it just appears in Middle English. There are what look to be cognates in Swedish and Icelandic, which might point to the word having been brought to England by the Vikings, but there are phonological problems with that hypothesis that make it unlikely.

In Middle English, fond could also be a noun, meaning “fool,” as in Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale, written c. 1390:

Why ne had thow pit the capul in the lathe?
Ilhayl! By God, Alayn, thou is a fonne!

(Why did you not put the horse in the barn?
Ill fortune! By God, Alan, you are a fond!)

But over time, the word softened, coming to mean gently foolish, as in a person overcome with the madness of love. In 1578, John Lyly writes in his Euphues:

If Phillis were now to take counsayle, shee would not be so foolish to hang hir selfe, neyther Dido so fonde to dye for Aeneas, neyther Pasiphae so monstrous to loue a Bull, nor Phedra so vnnaturall to be enamoured of hir sonne.

And by 1590, Shakespeare was using fond in its modern sense, where the foolish connotation has been dropped, leaving only the gently loving. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.1), Oberon tells Puck:

A sweet Athenian Lady is in loue
With a disdainefull youth: annoint his eyes,
But doe it when the next thing he espies,
May be the Lady. Thou shalt know the man,
By the Athenian garments he hath on,
Effect it with some care, that he may proue
More fond on her then she vpon her loue.

But the older sense of foolish did not completely disappear for some while. Thirteen years later the Bard has this exchange in Measure for Measure (2.2)

Isab[ella]. Hark, how Ile bribe you: good my Lord turn back.

Ang[elo]. How? bribe me?

Is. I, with such gifts the heauen shall share with you.

Luc[io]. You had mar’d all else.

Isab. Not with fond Sickles [foolish shekels] of the tested gold,
Or Stones, whose rate are either rich, or poore
As fancie values them: but with true prayers.

So when you say you are fond of words and language, there may be double entendre buried in there.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Reeve’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 1:4088–89. Harvard Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Liberman, Anatoly, Word Origins ... And How We Know Them, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 91, 195.

Lyly, John. Euphues. The Anatomy of Wyt. London: Gabriell Cawood, 1578, 39. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. fonnen, v., fonne, n., fonned, ppl. & adj.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, December 2020, s.v. fond, adj. (& adv.) & n.1, fon, v., fon, n.1 & adj.1, fondle, v.; September 2017, fun, n. & adj., fun, v.

Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 2.2, 68. STC 22273 Fo.1 no.68. Folger Shakespeare Library.

———. A Midsommer Nights Dreame. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 2.1, 150. STC 22273 Fo.1 no.68. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Photo credit: Dave Wilton, 2025. Licensable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

meritocracy

Imperial examination, Ming Dynasty, 17th/18th century

1 October 2025

A meritocracy is lauded in some circles as the ideal society, where one is rewarded for one’s skill, intelligence, and abilities rather than, for instance, the circumstances of one’s birth. Yet it is worth knowing that the word meritocracy, was originally intended as a description of a dystopian society, and early use was often in a tongue-in-cheek, satirical vein. Like the phrase pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, it was not intended to be taken as a serious proposition.

The term meritocracy arose in socialist circles in the 1950s as a derisive term for a new system of class oppression. The first known use of the term is by Alan Fox in the journal Socialist Commentary of May 1956. Fox writes:

[Social stratification] will remain as long as we assume it to be a law of nature that those of higher occupational status must not only enjoy markedly superior education as well but also, by right and necessity, have a higher income in the bargain. As long as that assumption remains—as long as violation of it are regarded as grotesque paradoxes—then so long will our society be divisible into the blessed and the unblessed—those who get the best of everything, and those who get the poorest and the least. This way lies the “meritocracy”; the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfillment of exercising their natural endowment but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure.

This is not enough. Merely to devise bigger and better “sieves” (“equality of opportunity”) to help the clever boys get to the top and then pile rewards on them when they get there is the vision of a certain brand of New Conservatism; it has never been the vision of socialism.

The term made its way into mainstream discourse via the publication of Michael Young’s 1958 The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: The New Elite of Our Social Revolution. Young’s book is a satirical look at 1950s British society from the perspective of someone writing from the distant perspective of the year 2034. Young writes of an imagined scenario where a fixed retirement age created a system that, while preferable to the old aristocratic hereditary order, ended up sidelining the most experienced and able:

Before the meritocracy was fully established, age-stratification as a substitute for the hereditary order may have been necessary for the sake of social stability. But the cost was very high. Every year hundreds of thousands of elderly me, some of whom would have been much more assets than liabilities to their employers, were forced to retreat into idleness, and deprived of their own self-esteem, by the rigidity of the promotion system.

Young is basically echoing Fox’s sentiment that the meritocracy is simply a replacement of one class of bosses with another. In Young’s fictional future-history, the hereditary rulers of Britain had been replaced by a seniority system (“age-stratification”), which, in the 1950s, was being replaced by one based on perceived merit. Young’s book made something of a splash, and was much commented upon in the mainstream press upon its publication.

Young later claimed to have coined the term, and he may have used it without conscious awareness that it was already in use. And many writers have followed suit, crediting Young with coining the term. But he did not—as any quick look at the OED, which contains the Fox citation from two years earlier, would confirm. Young was simply using a term that was already in use by those discussing the problems of social and economic stratification.

Meritocracy was originally derisive, not satirical, although Young’s book is definitely satire. But it is certainly ironic that twenty-first century capitalism has adopted this socialist slur as justification for its existence.

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Sources:

Fox, Alan. “Class and Equality.” Socialist Commentary. May 1956, 11–13 at 13.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2001. s.v. meritocracy, n.

Young, Michael. The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: The New Elite of Our Social Revolution (1958). Hammondsworth, England: Penguin, 1961, 91.

Zimmer, Ben. “A ‘Meritocracy’ Is Not What People Think It Is.” The Atlantic. 14 March 2019.

Image credit: Unknown artist, 17th or 18th century. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

Ultima Thule / Thule

Detail of Olaus Magnus’s 1539 Carta marina map, showing Thule (Tile) between the Hebrides, the Orkney, and the Faeroe islands, in a place where no actual island exists; Iceland is depicted on the map outside of this detailed section

29 September 2025

The name Thule has a long history of referring to some distant place. It may be most familiar to English-speakers today as the name of place in Greenland. In 1910, Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen established a trading post with that name at the site the Inuit called Uummannaq (heart-shaped). Subsequently the Inuit settlement came to be called Pituffik (where dogs are tied). In 1951, the US Air Force relocated the Inuit residents and constructed an airbase there, dubbing it Thule after Rasmussen’s nomenclature. In 2020 the base was rechristened Pituffik Space Base.

Of more recent vintage, in 2014 astronomer Marc Buie discovered what is now called 486958 Arrokoth (cloud in the Powhatan language), a Kuiper Belt object. The object was provisionally nicknamed Ultima Thule, and in 2019 the New Horizons spacecraft flew by the object, making it the most distant object visited by a spacecraft. Almost every news report of the New Horizons encounter said that the name meant “beyond the edges of the known world.” But that is not exactly the case. Ultima Thule is not a vague, undefined location. It is a specific place in the North Atlantic, although exactly which place it refers to is uncertain to us today, and various classical and medieval writers may have used the name to refer to different places. It has been used in the metaphorical sense that the news articles describe, but that’s not the name’s meaning. The metaphorical sense is akin to referring to Timbuktu, a very real place in North Africa, as metaphor for somewhere distant and inaccessible. 

Ultima simply means “farthest” in Latin, and Thule is a place name of unknown origin. So the name simply means that Thule is very far away.

The earliest known reference to Ultima Thule is in Polybius’s account of the voyage of Pytheas, written in the second century BCE. Pytheas supposedly traveled to Thule, an island six days sail north of Britain. Today we’re not sure exactly which place in the North Atlantic Polybius was referring to. It may have been the Shetland Islands, Iceland, or somewhere in what is now Denmark or Norway, but it was definitely a specific, defined location. Pliny, Tacitus, and Virgil also made reference to Ultima Thule. Classical and medieval references to Ultima Thule are to this specific place, although today we aren’t quite sure where that is.

The earliest references to Thule in English dates to the late ninth century. It appears in the Old English translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. In this passage the character of Wisdom is speaking of a hypothetical emperor who rules the entire world:

Þeah he nu ricsige ofer eallne middangeard from eastweardum oð westeweardne, from Indeum, þæt is se suðeastende þisses middaneardes, oð ðæt iland þe we hatað Tyle, þæt is on þam norðwestende þisses middaneardes, þær ne bið nawþer ne on sumera niht ne on wintra dæg, þeah he nu þæs ealles wealde, næfð he no þe maran anweald gif he his ingeþances anweald næfð and gif he hine ne warenað with þa unþeawas þe we ær ymb spræcon.

(Though he now ruled over all middle earth, from east to west, from India, which is the southeast corner of this middle earth, to that island we call Thule, which is in the northwest corner of this middle earth, where there is neither night in summer nor day in winter, though he now ruled all that, he does not rule over his inner thoughts if he does not protect himself against the vices that we spoke about before)

From the description of Thule here, it is clear that it is a reference to a place above, or at least near, the Arctic Circle.

The name also appears in the Old English adaptation of Orosius’s History Against the Pagans, written at about the same time:

And on westhealfe on oþre healfe þæs sæs earmes is Ibernia þæt igland, and on the norðhealfe Orcadus þæt igland. Igbernia, þæt we “Scotland” hatað, hit is on ælce healfe ymbfangen mid garsecge. And forðon þe sio sunne þær gæð near on setl þonne on oðrum lande, þær syndon lyðran wedera þonne on Brettannia. Þonne be westannorðan Ibernia is þæt ytemeste land þæt man hæt Thila, and hit is feawum mannum cuð for þære oferfyrre.

(And to the west, on the other side of the arm of this sea is the island of Hibernia, and to the north the island of Orkney. Hibernia, which we call “Scotland,” is on each side surrounded by the ocean. And because the sun comes neaer to it when it sets than to other lands, there the weather is milder than in Britain. Northwest of Hibernia is the farthest land, which people call Thule, and it is known to few people because of the distance.)

Hibernia is the Latin name for Ireland (despite the name Scotland, a reference to the Scoti people which originally referred to the Celtic people of Ireland), and in this passage Thule refers to someplace more distant than the Orkneys, perhaps Iceland.

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Sources:

Boethius. The Old English Boethius, vol. 1 of 2. Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009, 29.77–88, 303.

Orosius. The Old English History of the World. Malcom R. Godden, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 1.32, 50–52.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1912, s.v. Thule, n.

Image credit: Olaus Magnus, 1539. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

suborn

Illustration accompanying the c. 1686 broadside ballad “Perjury Punish’d with Equal Justice; or, Miles Prance”

26 September 2025

Suborn is a verb that is usually heard in the context of lying under oath, and indeed roughly half of the instances of the verb in the Corpus of Contemporary American English are in the phrase suborn perjury. The verb clearly means to induce someone to commit a crime, but where does it come from?

Like many English legal terms, this one comes from French, a result of the Normans taking over the English legal system after 1066. In particular the English suborn comes from the Anglo-Norman suburner or subhorner, the meaning of which is remarkably consistent with the present-day English verb.

From a 1358 city of London statute:

Et plus curial chose serroit et accordaunt a ley et reson que homme se acquittat par son serment et siz bones gentz de jurer ovesqe lui ou par enquest de doze hommes qe par deux, issint subornés et faucement procures et enformés

(And because it would be more seemly and more according to law and reason that man should acquit himself his oath and that of six good people swearing with him, or by an inquest of twelve men, than by the witness of two thus suborned and tortiously procured and primed)

We see the English use of the word in the Parliamentary Rolls for 1430–31, in the case of Eleanor de Holland, wife of James Tuchet, 5th Baron Audley. She was trying to prove that her birth was legitimate and, therefore, that she was the heiress to her father, Edmund, Earl of Kent. A petition in the Rolls by Edmund’s sisters, who would otherwise inherit, alleges that she suborned false testimony:

Alianore, wyf to James, upon grete subtilite, ymagined processe, prive labour, and colored menes and weyes, to yentent yat she shuld be certified mulire be sum ordinarie, in case yat bastardie were alleged in her persone, hath broght in examination afore certein Jugges in Court Cristiene and Spirituell, nat enfourmed, nor havyng knawleche of ye saide subtilite, ymagined processe, prive labour, coloured menes and weyes, certeyns subornatz proves and persones of hir assent and covyne.

(Eleanor, wife to James, with great trickery, imagined process, secret labor, and deceitful means and ways, intending that she should be certified legitimate by some authority, in case that bastardy were alleged in her person, has brought in examination before certain judges in ecclesiastical court, not informed, nor having knowledge of the said trickery imagined process, secret labor, and deceitful means and ways, certain suborned proofs and persons with her assent and fraud.)

We don’t have a record of what the ecclesiastical court decided, but from the petition’s wording (the court being unaware of the alleged perjury) it appears that they decided in Eleanor’s favor. Regardless of the truth of the matter, Parliament granted the petition, and the sisters inherited.

Of course, with the word coming from French, we can trace suborn’s roots back to Latin, where the basic meaning of the verb subornare is to equip, to adorn, but where it was also used to refer to inducing or inciting a crime, especially perjury. For instance we have this from Cicero’s Pro Aulo Caecina 71, a speech he gave in 69 B.C.E.:

Itaque in ceteris controversiis atque iudiciis, quum quaeritur, aliquid factum necne sit, verum an falsum proferatur, et fictus testis subornari solet, et interponi falsae tabulae, nonnumquam honesto ac probabili nomine bono viro iudici error obiici, improbo facultas dari, ut, quum sciens perperam iudicarit, testem tamen aut tabulas secutus esse videatur.

(And so it often happens in the ordinary disputes that come before a court, when it is a question of whether something is or is not a fact or whether an allegation is true or false, that a false witness is suborned, forged documents are put in and sometimes, under the guise of fair and honest dealing, an honest juror is deceived or a dishonest juror afforded the chance of giving the impression that his wrong verdict, which was really intentional, was the result of his having been guided by the witness or the documents.)

The etymology of suborn is, therefore, quite ordinary and straightforward, but it is unusual in that the meaning and patterns of usage have been preserved pretty much unchanged for over two millennia.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND Phase 5 (R–S) 2018–21, suburné.

Bateson, Mary. Borough Customs, vol. 1 of 2. Seldon Society 18. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1904, 169–70. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Cicero. Pro lege Manila. Pro Caecina. Pro Cluentio. Pro Rabiro perduellionis reo. Jeffrey Henderson, ed. H. Grose Hodge, trans. Loeb Classical Library, Cicero 9, LCL 198. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1927, 166–69. Loeb Classical Library Online.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. subornate, ppl.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2012, s.v. suborn, v.

“Parliament. IX Hen. VI” (1430–31). Rotuli parliamentorum; ut et petiones, et placita in parliamento. Tempore Henrici R. V., vol. 4. London: 1767–77,  375b. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Image credit: unknown illustrator, c. 1686. Wikimedia Commons. English Broadside Ballad Archive. Public domain image.

hogmanay

24 September 2025

This word is one that will be unfamiliar to many, if not most, Americans. Hogmanay is a Scots word for New Year’s Eve or for a gift given to someone, especially a child, at the new year. It is a borrowing from the French auguilanleu, which in turn is probably a variation on l’an neuf, (the new year).

It is first recorded in an otherwise Latin record of gifts given at the order of Sir Robert Waterton in Methley, West Yorkshire for New Year’s 1443–44:

Et solutum xxxj die decembris magn. hagnonayse xijd. Et parv. Hagnonayse viijd. xxd.
Et solutum primo die mensis Januarij Pasy munstrallo ex precepto domini xijd. Et solutum iiij die mensis Januarij instrionibus Thome Haryngton ex precepto domini xxd.

(And paid on 31 December (for) a large hogmanay 12 pence, and (for) a small hogmanay 8 pence 20 pence.
And paid on 1 January to Pasy, a minstrel, by the lord’s command 12 pence. And paid on 4 January to the players of Thomas Haryngton, by the lord’s command, 20 pence.)

Hogmanay doesn’t appear again for some 150 years, making this relatively southern appearance of the word even more of an outlier. It seems likely, therefore, that the word was oral and colloquial use in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in both the north of England and in Scotland.

We next see the word in the court records of Elgin Scotland for 1604, when a certain William Patton was summoned for “singing hogmanay.” The Oxford English Dictionary places this use under the sense of a New Year’s gift, meaning that Patton was accused of asking for such a gift. Alternatively, he could have been celebrating hogmanay:

January 3rd.—Jonet Wulsoun and Meg Gadderar accusit for dancing on Sonday last befoir the Shereffis yet. William Pattoun delatit to haue been singand hagmonayis on Satirday and thairfoir to be summonit to Fryday nixt.

(3 January—Janet Wulsoun and Meg Gadderar are accused of dancing last Sunday before the sheriff’s gate. William Pattoun accused of having been singing hogmanay on Saturday, and therefore to be summoned next Friday.)

It clearly appears as a name for New Year’s Eve in a “Blasphemous & Treasonable Paper” published in 1681:

We renounce the names of Moneths, as January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, Nov. December. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Martymass, Hol•••yes, for there is none holy but the Sabbath day. Lambas day, Whitsunday, Candlemass, Beltan, Crossstones, and Images Fairs, named by Saints, and all the remnants of Popery, Yool or Christmas, old wives Fables and By words, as Palmsunday, Carlinsunday, the 29. of May, being dedicat by this Generation to Prophanity, Peacesunday, Halloweven, Hogmynae night, Valenteins even; no Marrying in the Moneth they call May.

The entire pamphlet is one long list of “blasphemies” that the authors are rejecting. The authors claim to be in prison in London for their crimes, and this is supposed to be a confession. It’s clearly satire and not to be taken seriously, but the mention of hogmanay is legitimate evidence for our purposes here.

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Sources:

Cramond, William. The Records of Elgin 1234–1800, vol. 2. Stephen Ree, ed. Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 1908, 119. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Ker, Walter, et al. A Blasphemous & Treasonable Paper, Emitted by the Phanatical Under-subscribers, on May 1, 1681, 3. University of Michigan Library. Google Books.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, November 2010, s.v. hogmanay, n.

Scottish National Dictionary, 2005, s.v. hogmanay, n. Dictionaries of the Scots Language | Dictionars of the Scots Leid.

Yarwood, R. E. “Hogmanay 1443 in West Yorkshire.” Folklore, 95.2, 1984, 252–254 at 253. JSTOR.

Photo credit: Robbie Shade, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Unported license.