fool [ME] The root of fool is Latin follis, which originally meant ‘bellows, windbag’, and came to mean ‘an empty-headed person’, in the same way that windbag (LME, but E19th in this sense) does in English. The use of fool to mean a jester or clown also goes back to the Middle Ages. People in the 16th century seem to have been particularly aware of the ways in which someone may come to grief through lack of wisdom, especially in their dealings with others. A fool and his money are soon parted, a fool at forty is a fool indeed, and there’s no fool like an old fool all come from this period. Two centuries later foolish behaviour was still a matter for concern—in 1711 the poet Alexander Pope published the line which has become proverbial, ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’ Eager prospectors have been mistaking worthless minerals such as iron pyrites, or fool’s gold, for gold since the late 19th century. The term foolscap for a paper size dates from the late 17th century, and is said to be named after a former watermark representing a fool’s cap. Sadly, a traditional story that after the Civil War Parliament gave orders that a fool’s cap should replace the royal arms in the watermark of the paper used for the Journals of the House of Commons apparently has no basis in fact.