I love the word fathom and imagine oceans and understanding whenever I hear the word. But this older definition is pure gold. As established by an Act of Parliament, a fathom was:

The length of a man’s arms around the object of his affections.

You’ll note that I got this definition and the quote below from a very authoritative source:

“Fathom originally was a land-based measuring term. It comes from the Anglo-Saxon word faetm, embracing arms or to embrace. Common measurements in the Middle Ages and earlier were based on the average size of parts of the body, such as the foot, the hand (still used for measuring horses) or the rod (the left foot, heel to toe, of forty pious men as they left church on a Sunday morning). A fathom was established by an act of Parliament, as “the length of a man’s arms around the object of his affections.” Fathom became a term used to describe the act of taking the measure of something. Thus, trying to fathom something is trying to figure it out.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.