Idiom
bona fide
Meaning
Genuine and honestly meant — the real thing, not a pretence.
Examples
“It was a bona fide offer, not a joke.”
“The discount is open to any bona fide student with a current enrolment card.”
“Establishing that the buyer was bona fide decided the case, because a purchaser who paid a fair price with no notice of the earlier claim takes good title however badly the seller behaved.”
Examples
simple
“It was a bona fide offer, not a joke.”
contextual
“The discount is open to any bona fide student with a current enrolment card.”
complex
“Establishing that the buyer was bona fide decided the case, because a purchaser who paid a fair price with no notice of the earlier claim takes good title however badly the seller behaved.”
Origin
Bona fides — good faith — was not a decoration in Roman law but a working standard. A whole class of contracts, including sale, hire, partnership and agency, were bonae fidei: the judge was instructed to decide not by the strict letter of what was written but by what good faith required between the parties. It was the mechanism by which Roman law kept up with commercial reality.
Bona fide is the ablative form, meaning in good faith, and English borrowed it as an adjective. A bona fide purchaser is one who bought honestly and without notice of anyone else's claim — still a live category in property law today.
Ordinary English has loosened it to mean simply genuine: a bona fide offer, a bona fide expert. The plural noun bona fides went its own way and now means credentials — the evidence that someone is what they claim.
Stories
The Law's Latin · See all Roman origin
Roman legal Latin that never left the courtroom — or the boardroom.
caveat emptor — Let the buyer beware — checking what you are buying is your own problem.
quid pro quo — Something given in return for something else, usually as an understood trade.
de facto — In practice, whatever the official position says.
de jure — According to the law, whether or not that is what actually happens.
ipso facto — By that very fact — the consequence follows automatically, with no further step.
the status quo — The way things currently are, especially when someone wants to keep them that way.
- Level
- C1 · Advanced
- Updated