Fleet Origins
Here at the insurance broker that employs me, “Fleet Insurance” trips off the tongue and bounces off web pages all too easily. No one thinks about the expression. Fleet Insurance is simply one of our products, and it is our job to find the cheapest and most suitable cover for our clients. We’re involved in Truck Fleets, car Fleets, van fleets – all kinds of fleet.
As a young and keen A Level student, I studied a book called Our Language by a chap called Simeon Potter, and that gave me a life-long interest in etymology. I look at words and try to work out where they came from. Interestingly, if you know the root word it can help to get a deeper understanding of the word itself. Anyway, back to Fleet Insurance. I was thinking about the word the other day. I had previously satisfied myself that it came from the Fleets of ships that once made this nation great. A Fleet is basically more than one.
In a moment of weakness, I decided to look it up. It must have more history that that, I thought. And I was right. According to a brilliant web site I have found, called Word-Origins, Fleet comes from a very old Indo European word – pleu-, meaning ‘flow, float’ but the actual word Fleet comes from another derivation of the plue which is the German word fleutan which means ‘float, swim’. There is a lot more on the page, so if you are interested you ought to have a look. I was interested to see that Fleet Street has got nothing to do with ships, but relates to an inlet from the Thames, and that the word “fleeting” as in “fleeting glance” is all that’s left in our language from the old verb. In the 16th century it adopted a sense of transience.
So now you know what insurance brokers do to make their lives in the world of fleet insurance more interesting than simply finding the cheapest. We do loads of other insurances too, and I am going to look some of those words up when I get time.
