DOOMED LAWS

Here's another reason to loathe attorneys: the word doom used to mean "law" in Old English. This was as the phoneme dom, which also meant "judgement" and is present in many terms you should know. The Great Survey ordered by William the Conqueror in 1086 was compiled in the Domesday book (Domesday being an obsolete form of doomsday) because everything was being "judged" by the rightful king. The suffix -dom as in kingdom, fiefdom, and Christendom just means "being judged", by your ruler, landlord, and Christ, respectively. All this dom stuff goes back to the Proto-Germanic word domaz, which etymologists concur meant "judgement" as well. This traces to a Proto-Indo-European word which sounded like dhe and meant "to place". The whole reason doom came to mean "terrible fate" is because of the notion that on Judgement Day, or doomsday, God would punish those who were sinful. Or something like that; you get the idea. I'm a linguist, not a theologian.