Fake > Adaptable

fake

of unknown origin; attested in London criminal slang as adjective (1775, "counterfeit"), verb (1812, "to rob"), and noun (1851, "a swindle;" of persons 1888, "a swindler"), but probably older. A likely source is feague "to spruce up by artificial means," from German fegen "polish, sweep," also "to clear out, plunder" in colloquial use. "Much of our early thieves' slang is Ger. or Du., and dates from the Thirty Years' War" [Weekley]. Or it may be from Latin facere "to do." Century Dictionary notes that "thieves' slang is shifting and has no history."

The nautical word meaning "one of the windings of a cable or hawser in a coil" probably is unrelated, from Swedish veck "a fold." As a verb, "to feign, simulate" from 1941. To fake it is from 1915, jazz slang; to fake (someone) out is from 1940s, originally in sports. Related: Faked; fakes; faking.

The jazz musician's fake book is attested from 1951. Fake news "journalism that is deliberately misleading" is attested from 1894; popularized in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

Thieves’ cant or flash is the secret slang used by professional criminals in Britain from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Built on coded words, rhyming ruses, and disguised grammar, it let pickpockets, highwaymen, and fences talk business in public without being understood by constables or victims. Some of its terms—swag (stolen goods), squeak (to inform), and fake (counterfeit)—leaked into ordinary slang and survive today.

At that time, the big-money crime of the moment was forgery—altering bills of exchange, shipping papers, and Bank of England notes. In March 1775, the city papers exploded with coverage of the Perreau–Rudd forgery scandal, a sensational case built on expertly faked bonds and signatures.

The exact phrase “fake news” was already in circulation by 1894, coined during the cut-throat newspaper wars of America’s yellow-journalism era. Editors used it as a blunt label for the sensational, wholly invented stories rival papers printed to grab street sales—like the 1890 wire report accusing the New-York World of faking a presidential interview. In that heated market of exaggerated scoops and circulation stunts, “fake news” entered public vocabulary as a charge of deliberate journalistic fraud rather than the broader political weapon it would become a century later.

In 1915, “fake it” surfaced in American jazz slang, meaning to improvise a passage when you don’t know the score. The phrase was born in the communal, high-pressure world of dance-hall bands: a musician who hadn’t rehearsed the chart would “fake” the chords, hoping no one noticed. Within a decade, the idiom slipped off the bandstand and into everyday speech, widening into the familiar sense of pretending competence or confidence you don’t yet possess.

The following word doesn’t come up much in conversation anymore, but has a fascinating history that’s more specific to a counterfeit person rather than an action or object.

changeling(n.)

1550s, "one given to change," from change (n.) + diminutive suffix -ling. The meaning "person or thing left in place of one secretly taken" is from 1560s; the specific reference to an infant or young child (usually stupid, strange, or ugly) superstitiously believed to have been left by the faeries in place of a beautiful or charming one they have stolen away is from 1580s. An earlier word for it was oaf or auf.

The changeling legend is a pan-European folklore motif, but its deepest roots lie in medieval Gaelic and Germanic lore. In these traditions, fairies, elves, or trolls were believed to kidnap human infants and leave a substitute—often a sickly or deformed fairy child, a “stock,” or an enchanted piece of wood—in the cradle. The tale spread across Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries, later absorbing Christian interpretations that cast the swap as demonic rather than fairy work. By the sixteenth century, the story had become a common explanation for childhood illness, disability, or failure to thrive.

Could you imagine what it would be like to grow up with a disability and have some of your community or even family suspect you were switched out by the devil? Just wow, our ancestors went through a lot. It gives a whole other perspective on how far we’ve evolved.

adaptable(adj.)

1680s, "capable of being made to fit by alteration," from adapt + -able.

adaptation(n.)

c. 1600, "action of adapting (something to something else)," from French adaptation, from Late Latin adaptationem (nominative adaptatio), noun of action from past-participle stem of adaptare "to adjust," from ad "to" (see ad-) + aptare "to join," from aptus "fitted" (see apt).

The meaning "condition of being adapted, state of being fitted to circumstances or relations" is from 1670s. The sense of "modification of a thing to suit new conditions" is from 1790. The biological sense of "variations in a living thing to suit changed conditions" is by 1859, in Darwin's writings.

In Roman usage, adaptare was a craftsman’s term, not a moral or psychological one. Texts from Vitruvius to the agricultural writers apply it to tailoring materials—timber cut to fit a joint, a vine pruned to suit a wall, a cloak adjusted to the body. The cultural assumption behind the word was utilitarian: value lies in usefulness, and usefulness demands precise fitting of part to part.

In the 1670s, England was re-ordering itself after the Restoration: a new scientific mood (Boyle, early Royal Society) prized observation of how organisms or mechanisms “fit” their conditions, while court and coffee-house society re-negotiated who belonged where in a shifting political hierarchy. Speaking of a “condition of being adapted” therefore carried two fresh overtones: a scientific sense that fitness could be measured against an environment, and a social sense that people, like gears or garments, might need recutting to suit the restored monarchy’s changing etiquette. The word moved from the workshop (Latin adaptare, “adjust a part”) to the drawing room, acquiring an abstract, status-minded nuance it had never possessed in Rome.

By 1790, the Enlightenment faith in perfectibility collided with two live demonstrations that societies could be dismantled and rebuilt. The American Revolution had just framed a Constitution whose very mechanism was amendment—“We can refit the machine if it misfires.” Across the Channel, France was inventing new currencies and even a new calendar, all justified as rational adjustments to circumstance. In this atmosphere, “modification to suit new conditions” stopped being a workshop term and became a civic duty: institutions, constitutions, even personal identities were expected to be re-engineered when the landscape changed. The word adaptation moved from describing a tailor’s alteration to naming the Enlightenment’s core promise—that anything, including the body politic, could be dismantled and sewn anew.

In 1859, Charles Darwin needed a plain English label for the variations that let organisms survive in shifting environments. On the Origin of Species presented life not as fixed creations but as populations constantly refitted to new climates, predators, or food sources. Victorians already lived amid railways, factory smoke, and global exploration; the idea that nature, too, was a workshop of ceaseless change to the environment matched the industrial mood. The term immediately clashed with natural theology—if species could re-tool themselves, they did not need miraculous design—so adaptation became the hinge on which scientific and religious cultures clashed.