I have been researching typographic terminology for an article I plan
to submit to a number of on- and off-line publishing houses. (Was that
vague enough?) According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, famous for its exhaustive word histories, the word
‘serif’ was a back formation from the word ‘sans-serif’. In
other words, serif was not, as I have always assumed, a French word,
but rather a ‘faux-french’ word invented in England just after the
English invention of ‘sans-serif.
    According to the OED, the
words were first recorded in print in 1830 (serif) and 1841
(sans-serif).  So it seems that serif came first, right? No,
actually. They are so close to each other biblio-geologically that
apparently the invention of the word ‘sans-serif’ led quite nicely to
the invention of the word serif. 
    My question now is
this: if there was no word ‘serif’, what word was previously used, in
any language, to describe what my first type teacher, P. Lyn Middleton,
called ‘the little feet on the letters’?  It’s almost impossible
to believe that no one ever mentioned them. Sans-serif Roman type was,
amazingly, not invented until the mid-nineteenth century. For nearly
2000 years, if you wrote with the Roman alphabet, the serif was
literally ubiquitous!