It’s high time we examine a serious word of a properly jurisprudential nature. Indeed, the law is a rich source of jagged jargon riddled with Latin: garnishment, acquittal, subpoena, certiorari, expunge and this week’s word, fungible. I must thank my astute friend Thomas Cloud for suggesting it.

If something is fungible, it is not “fun,” “fungus-like” or even “funny” (to put it another way, it’s not a humorous fungus; I would not advise talking to such a creature if you encounter it). Our word is, however, descriptive of a thing or things that can be exchanged for another thing or things: something that is interchangeable, such as money.

In the olden days, the “gold standard” meant that the paper money you bought this copy of The Daily with (oh, wait, never mind, it’s free) could have been directly exchanged for its equivalent in gold (or some other valuable metal, such as silver; sorry, William Jennings Bryan). But the basic fungible principle remains the same, in that you take your dough, roll down to any number of fine mercantile establishments, fork over your greenbacks and get something(s) in return — ideally, thing(s) of equal value, thus demonstrating our society’s capitalistic fungibility with your fungibles.

The word comes to us from the medieval Latin world “fungibilis,” from the Latin phrase “fungi vice,” meaning “to take the place” or “fulfill the office of,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which also notes its first recorded use in English as an adjective, in Henry T. Colebrooke’s (1765–1837) Obligations and Contracts, with this passing snippet: “In the instance of money and other fungible articles … .”

Colebrooke was an administrator and judge in India, but also an expert on Sanskrit linguistics, mathematics and Hinduism, among many other subjects. He was also director of the Royal Asiatic Society, writing so prolifically, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, that one of his articles on a subject such as Indian poetry could rival a modern doctoral dissertation for its sheer length and depth.

As a noun, it was first used by the noted Scottish jurist (and chair of Scottish law at the University of Edinburgh) John Erskine (1695–1768), in his Institute of the Law of Scotland (that’s about as Scottish as one can get, legally), in the line, “Grain and coin are fungibles, because one guinea, or one bushel or boll of sufficient merchantable wheat, precisely supplies the place of another.”

A final fungible example is supplied by this line from a Dec. 25, 1886 article in The Saturday Review: “A certain number of persons … do not … regard books as ‘fungible,’ but exercise a choice as to the books they read.” Good advice, I must say; your mind isn’t fungible, even if your books are.

I really do hope that you had a truly non-fungible time learning about fungible. But if you have any word ideas for next week’s column, please let me know, and, until next time, cheerio!

Reach columnist Will Mari at features@dailyuw.com.