Pylimitics

When you’re “fond” of something or someone, it’s a feeling of affection or liking. Most people don’t think that’s “foolish or stupid,” but that’s where the word “fond” comes from. Its origin is in the Middle English word “fonnen,” which was a verb meaning “to be stupid” or “to make a fool of someone.” If you were foolish yesterday you had “fonned, and that’s the word that became our “fond.” “Fun” and “fondle” come from the same Middle English root.

“Fond” itself was also around in Middle English. You can find it in Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale, where it was used as a noun (“Alan, you are a fond!”) meaning a fool or idiot. It had another meaning, though: insipid or flavorless. At about the same time as Chaucer was writing, John Wyclif (a theologian) used the word in the second sense: 

“Ȝif þe salt be fonnyd it is not worþi.”
(If the salt is fond, it is not worthy.)

As time went on, the meaning of the word came to mean “gently foolish.” Maybe that’s the sort of foolishness exhibited by someone who’s overcome with love. John Lyly used the word that way in 1579 in the book Eupues, the Anatomy of Wyt:

“A cooling Carde for Philautus and all fond louers.” (lovers)

That sense of “fond” led very quickly and directly to our modern sense, which is how Shakespeare’s used it in 1590 in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

“Effect it with some care, that he may prove
More fond on her than she upon her love.”

But surprise! The older meaning (“foolish”) was still lurking around, and of all people, Shakespeare himself used it that way thirteen years later in Measure for Measure:

“I’ll bribe you.
[…]
Not with fond sicles [foolish shekels] of tested gold,
Or stones, whose rate are either rich or poor
As fancy values them; but with true prayers.”

The moral of this story is probably to be careful — if you say you’re fond of a word of the day; there might be a double meaning hidden in there!ˆ