Word of the week

nincompoop - silly person, fool, simpleton. The word was thought to origin in a Latin phrase "non compos mentis" which means "mentally incompetent", but linguists discarded the theory due to the lack of the second n in the earliest form of the word: nicompoop. Perplexed, etymologists searched other explanations. The late John Ciardi suggests that the word comes from Dutch phrase "nicht om poep" meaning "the female relative of a fool", others attribute the origin of the word to a proper name "Nicodemus" who appears in the Gospel as a naive simple person. In French, his name - Nicodeme -  is still being used to denote a fool.