‘No darling,’ I said, ‘nothing to do with mushrooms.’ My husband had responded to my exclaiming ‘What does she think that means?’ on hearing Theresa May use the word fungible. This rare word now crops up in discussion of Brexit, perhaps caught from lawyers and business types. They seem to think it means ‘porous, malleable, flexible, convertible’.
Dominic Grieve told the Commons last month that he’d prefer ‘a longer and fungible extension’ to the Article 50 process. Stephen Doughty spoke of a ‘flextension, fungible extension or whatever’. Jo Johnson said on another day that he wanted train tickets to be ‘fungible between operators’. Claire Perry assured the House that ‘scientists are not fungible’. Nick Clegg told the New Statesman that ‘time is the most fungible thing of all’.
The Oxford English Dictionary rejigged its entry for fungible in 2017, with the definition: ‘Of a good that has been contracted for: that can be replaced by another identical item’, or more generally ‘interchangeable’.
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