McBride, "to submit an animal to treatment or examination by a veterinarian." The meaning was extended at the turn of this century to "to examine closely," as in this 1904 use by Rudyard Kipling, who kept a horsy metaphor: "These are our crowd.
To vet the verb vet : it began with the Latin veter inus, "of cattle and similar domestic animals." ( Vet as a clipping of veteran is based on the Latin vetus, "old.") The first sense was the one most familiar to Dr. When a doctor scopes a patient or a nervous executive lawyers a document - even when a vet curbs a dog - the subject takes a noun and shifts its function to that of a verb. What we have here is a fine example of what English teachers who coach football teams call "functional shift": a noun becomes a verb and in this case develops a new sense right after the snap. Of course you can if a vet can vet a horse, Dr. My questioner wants to know if the new sense is applied only to documents, like household files, or to people as well he cites my own usage in regard to a judicial panel's choice of a potential Iraqgate special prosecutor: "We can hope it has a choice already vetted. Wood, whose sentence to Attorney Generalship was reduced to 24 hours, wrote: "Some of my household-help files were received by the White House 'vetters' at approximately 10 A.M." Use of the word in its gerund form was featured in a New York Times editorial that claimed Judge Wood's chances were destroyed by "clumsy vetting. Now the verb to vet means "to search for weaknesses or flaws" the noun vet continues to mean "animal doctor," but the noun for the person who does the vetting preparatory to clearance of a nominee for public office or candidate for any job is a vetter. I was accustomed to being called by the noun vet, but the use of the word as a verb to describe what I was doing was infrequent." McBride of Washingtonville, N.Y., "I was occasionally called to vet a horse. As a practicing veterinarian many years ago," writes Douglas F.
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