A: The word “guacamole” does come from “avocado” – the Nahuatl word for “avocado,” that is.

Let’s step back and take a look at the histories of these words.

We owe the avocado, along with chocolate and the tomato, to pre-Columbian Middle America, and the words for these tasty items to Nahuatl, the language of several important Indian peoples, including the Aztecs.

The Nahuatl word for the avocado was “ahuacatl,” which also means “testicle” – one sense presumably being a metaphor for the other, although we do not know which came first.

This word was borrowed into Spanish as “aguacate,” though by some peculiar twist of folk etymology some American Spanish speakers modified it to “abocado,” identical with “abocado” or “abogado,” meaning “advocate, lawyer.”

This modification eventually lost out to “aguacate” in almost all varieties of overseas Spanish, but not before it was borrowed into French (as “avocat”) and English (as “avocato” or “avocado”) in the late 17th century.

The same Nahuatl word that gave us “avocado” is also the source of “guacamole.”

The Nahautl word “ahuacatl” occurred in the compound “ahuacamolli,” which literally means “avocado sauce.” It was borrowed into Spanish as “guacamole,” which American English borrowed several centuries later.

Q Shouldn’t “bona fides” be a plural word, and appear with a plural verb? – S.C., Hartford, Conn.

A: “Bona fides” looks like a plural word in English, since it ends with that “s,” but in Latin there is no such thing as a single “bona fide.” Rather, “bona fides” is a singular noun that literally translates as “good faith.”

When “bona fides” entered English in the mid-17th century, it at first stayed very close to its Latin use – it was found mostly in legal contexts, and it meant “honesty or lawfulness of purpose” as well as “good faith, or sincerity,” just as it did in Latin. It also retained its singular construction.

Someone using this original sense might speak of “a claimant whose bona fides is unquestionable,” for example.

However, in the 20th century, use of “bona fides” began to widen, and it began to appear with a plural verb in certain contexts.

For example, a sentence such as “the informant’s bona fides were ascertained” is now possible.

So the short answer is that while “bona fides” isn’t necessarily a word that “should” be treated as a plural, it’s certainly possible and acceptable to do so.

QCan you please tell me the origin of the expression “Cheese it. The cops!”? -S. O., Cleveland, Ohio

A: The actual fixed idiom here is simply “cheese it” (because that part of the phrase can be used alone and still keep the same meaning), so we’ll leave “the cops” out of this explanation.

“Cheese it” has been part of English slang since at least the mid-1800s.

The word “cheese” has been used with the meaning “to put an end to” or “to stop” since at least 1812, and this is the sense which led to the idiomatic expression.

Whoever began using “cheese” in that way apparently decided to “cheese it” when people asked why, though, because no one has ever determined where that sense came from or why putting an end to an action should be related to cheese.

The exact origin of the phrase must be labeled unknown.

This column was prepared by the editors of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition. Readers may send questions to Merriam-Webster’s Wordwatch, P.O. Box 281, 47 Federal St., Springfield, MA.

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