When I first came across the phrase "a hermeneutic of continuity," it made no sense to me because the word "hermeneutic" is an adjective, at least in English. Do we know the actual origin of its usage as a noun? The Oxford English Dictionary had nothing.
I dunno, Doug, I remember first hearing the term back in undergrad, 70's. For being a thesaurus shill, I also remember thinking it to be a bogus word that'd gained cred, like "copasetic," a jive term that Cab Calloway rapped at the Cotton Club but ended up in the MW and other tomes. Wha' do I know, dat's jus' how things roll, word. H of continuity, H of rupture, H of sinus congestion, H of Hermoine Gingold.... I need an Atavan.
I am very familiar with the term "hermeneutics" as a branch or practice of literary and biblical criticism, but not "hermeneutic" as a singular thing.
Here is the earliest entry in OED for the singular form:
"1967 J. Macquarrie God-talk vii. 148 We could say that history is the hermeneutic of historical existence, or even that physics..is the hermeneutic of nature."
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