We often complain about "Cessna plummeted to the ground" type stories. So where did the verb "plummeted" come from? It did not exist until it was invented by reporters for aviation accidents during the 1930s.
A plummet was a lead weight used in a ship to sound the depth. It was also a plumb bob used by builders and surveyors. For a long time, people wrote that something “fell like a plummet”, referring to the way the plummet line spun out in a ship.
In January 1930 in describing a mid-air collision in the USA a journalist wrote “There was an explosive flash, and bodies were hurled out of the flaming ships and began to fall like plummets into the sea.” In the same month an accident at Point Cook , Victoria, “A surmise that a structural breakage can alone account for the sudden drop of the seaplane Widgeon 'straight down like a plummet into the water' from an altitude of 400 ft., would seem to be founded on the unlikelihood of 'engine trouble,' the occurrence of which is hardly thought compatible with a dive so swift and sudden.”
Then in 1933 “The U.S. Navy airship Akron dived into the ocean, off the American coast, with all hands aboard. Aboard her as she faltered and plummeted into the-storm-swept sea were 76 men, including Admiral William A. Moffett, chief of. the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics. Four men were rescued, but one of these died later.” This is close to the first invention of the word "plummet".
As the 1930s progressed, “dropped like a plummet” gradually gave way to the new verb “plummeted”, which had mostly taken over in aviation stories by 1937 and then proliferated during World War 2.