Writing in her diary on 29 October 1922, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) reflected on herself: "Either I am a great writer or a nincompoop." This comic shift in register sent me down the rabbit hole of "nincompoop". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its origin is unknown, but it has a long history, with the earliest use coming in a 1668 English translation of the title of Sebastian Brant's "Das Narrenschiff": "The ship of fools fully fraught and richly laden with asses, fools, jack-daws, ninnihammers, coxcombs, slender-wits, shallowbrains, paper-skuls, simpletons, nickumpoops, wiseakers, dunces, and blockheads." And I can't help but smile: Brant's book was originally published in my city, Basel, in 1494. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 September 2025)