What a terrible injustice Angela Cannings went through, being wrongly accused of killing her baby son, after having lost two previously, and then imprisoned. I heard her on Woman’s Hour and felt great sympathy for her and not a little anger at her persecutors.
I do not mean to trivialise her sufferings by latching on to two words she used on the wireless, inmate and soulmate. She spoke of ‘fellow inmates’ in prison, and this is the way the word is used today, as a synonym for ‘detainee’, in a prison, asylum or institution.
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Originally it meant a fellow lodger, so ‘fellow inmate’ would be a pleonasm. The Oxford English Dictionary leans to the idea that it derives from inn, meaning a place to stay, rather than in, the preposition.
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