Gimme a "V"

Thank you Slate Magazine. As an English teacher I have been wondering about this word:

"Where does the expression to vet come from?

It's a figurative contraction of veterinarian. The fancy word for animal doctor originated in the mid-17th century. The colloquial abbreviation dates to the 1860s; the verb form of the word, meaning "to treat an animal," came a few decades later—according to the Oxford English Dictionary the earliest known usage is 1891—and was applied primarily in a horse-racing context. ("He vetted the stallion before the race," "you should vet that horse before he races," etc.) By the early 1900s, vet had begun to be used as a synonym for evaluate, especially in the context of searching for flaws.

Through the early decades of the 20th century, vet was primarily a Britishism. It became fairly popular in the United Kingdom during the 1930s, especially to indicate the examination of candidates for military positions, as well as the inspection of manuscripts or public speeches prior to delivery. In his 1936 biography of G.K. Chesteron, William Richard Twitterton wrote: "[N]aturally each article of mine was vetted for libel with a microscope." Over the next couple of decades, it gained traction across the Atlantic. Time magazine appears to have used the word vetting for the first time in 1945... The word first appears out of quotes in that magazine in 1959

William Safire first tackled vetting for his "On Language" column in 1980. In response to a reader's complaint that Newsweek used the word twice in two weeks, Safire noted that "some dictionaries have it" and that "the Britishism is in vogue use in America today." He dedicated a second column to vetting in 1993, which is right around when the New York Times started using the expression with great frequency—in reference to Bill Clinton appointees, among other topics."

(Image credit: havenworks.com)