Words

Fee

fee
A payment for service, from fehu, the Proto-Indo-European word for cattle, the original money that walked.
Documented

Fehu, the walking wealth

PIE *peku (livestock, movable wealth) became Germanic fehu (Old English feoh, cattle and money), Latin pecus (cattle) and pecunia (money). Old English feoh became fee; feudal law reused it for land held in service, the fief. Pecuniary, peculiar (originally private property in cattle), and impecunious all moo quietly in the same pasture.

Assessment: Documented: the PIE root and both descendant families are philological bedrock.
Stories

The first ATM had hooves

The anthropology everyone's heard: cattle were humanity's first bank account, self-reproducing interest included. The rune Fehu, first of the runic alphabet, is literally named wealth-cattle, the alphabet opening with money.

Assessment: Stories: the rune name is documented; the bank metaphor is ours.
Interesting claims

Peculiar property

The strangest branch: peculium, the private property a Roman slave or son was permitted, from pecus. Peculiar thus once meant privately owned, then particular, then odd. The word for weird began as the word for yours.

Assessment: Interesting: the full slide, cattle to slave's purse to strange, is charted in the OED.
Sources and further reading
  1. Oxford English Dictionary, 'fee,' 'feoh'
  2. Pokorny, *peku-
  3. Julius Pokorny and Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots
Worth asking

When did wealth stop mooing, and did anyone notice the silence?

Open in the interactive archive
GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+