fool

Picture a leather bellows puffing air into a medieval blacksmith’s fire. Its Latin name was follis, and somewhere along the way that inflated object became a metaphor for an inflated person—a “windbag” full of hot air. By the early 1200s, Old French fol could mean an idiot, a madman, a rogue, or a jester, before Middle English borrowed it as fool. The court fool added a delicious complication: was he genuinely simple, or merely pretending so that he could say dangerous truths to the king? English had the word by about 1200, and by around 1300 it could describe both a professional clown and a person whose judgment had gone spectacularly wrong. The proposed path is not perfectly settled: some scholars connect the insult to folles, “puffed cheeks,” suggesting the comic face of a buffoon rather than a literal windbag. Either way, when you call someone a fool, you are faintly comparing them to something inflated—air in a bag, cheeks in a grin, or confidence with nothing solid inside.