638: fiat Sep 6, 2016

Any one of you readers who's kept up with Word Facts in the past would have known the way that Latin word change and been modified, either via other languages, or simply by the age of the word and the unforeseeable nature of language development to become the ones people know today. Sometimes, a lot less often than that, words will be taken directly from Latin, and used without modification. 'Fiat' is a word used to describe currency and commands among other things. It means literally, 'let it be done', and comes up in situations where there is no further rationale. A dollar bill, for example, can but does not have to represent something of actual value like water or gold; it is arbitrary, and therefore a fiat.