Photo by Kaycee Ingram on Unsplash
One of the occupational hazards of being a know-it-all is being caught knowing nothing about something that’s obviously familiar to everyone else. Thus it happened that yours truly was in a business meeting a few weeks back when someone, discussing what price to charge for a project, suggested placing a cap and collar on it.
In what I trust was a successful attempt to hide my ignorance, I kept my mouth shut and did my best to feign a wise smile. Then I googled cap and collar.
Turns out it’s a common clause in commercial contracts which sets a maximum and minimum variation in price (usually to allow for changes in the price of raw materials or labour, or in interest rates), thus protecting both the supplier and the customer from extreme events.
It’s a nice idiom, though hardly startling. But it did get me thinking about the word cap.
Cap emerged from Old English cæppe, meaning hood, head-covering or cape. Old English took it from one or more of the Germanic languages, which took it from the Latin cappa. Things get a little murky beyond that point, but one theory is that cappa may be connected to the Latin caput (head), which came from the PIE word kaput (also meaning head). As an aside, why the Latin is spelt with a c and the PIE with a k is a mystery to me.
Cappa also shows up in capital, captain, capitulate and, possibly, capillary, which comes from the Latin capillus, “hair”. But beginning with cap doesn’t automatically make a word a descendant of cappa. Capable and its variants are from the Latin capax, “able to hold much”. Capture is from the Latin captus, “to seize”.
As for that cappuccino you guzzled down this morning, it owes its name to its colour being similar to that of the brown hoods worn by some Capuchin friars. Given that Capuchin can be traced back to cappa, it can be added to the list that includes capital, captain, etc.
You may also be wondering if the PIE kaput is connected to the adjective kaput, which English stole from German in the 1800s (where it’s spelt kaputt) to describe something worn out or broken.
I’m delighted to tell you it is.
Kaputt is thought to have come from an almost forgotten, two-person card game called piquet, which was once hugely popular in France before fading into obscurity in the early 20th century. The phrase capot machen meant “to win all the tricks from the other player” and kaputt is simply a variation on capot. Capot machen, in turn, was the German version of the French phrase faire capot.
I know this is getting weird now, but stay with me. Faire capot is a nautical term meaning “to overset in a squall when under sail”. Overset means to tip over, so I’m guessing that faire capoting is rarely done deliberately.
Faire capot, as I’m sure you’ve been wondering, translates as “to make a bonnet”. I guess, if you’re sufficiently short-sighted and squint through the howling storm at just the right angle, a ship that’s going tits up might look a little bit like a bonnet. Especially if you’re from France, a country with remarkably lax attitudes towards everything but food and wine.
So faire capot, when playing cards, may have been a metaphor, suggesting that the winner has thrown a bonnet over the loser. It doesn’t hurt, either, that the French capot can also refer to a greatcoat, which fits over people - losers and winners alike - most wonderfully.
To the Romans, cappa referred to a woman’s head covering. As the word found its way into subsequent languages, its meaning meandered back and forth. It could mean the hood of a cloak, a cloak itself, a head covering for either gender, and even a form of ecclesiastical dress.
Many of the words for hat in the Romance languages are also descended from cappa, including the French chapeau, Italian cappello, Spanish capelo and Portuguese chapeo.
While we’re here, don’t you think it’s rough that the Romance languages have all the sexy words and we don’t? Why should those Frenchmen, for example, get to sit outside their Parisien cafes with their chapeaux jauntily tilted back, nonchalantly smoking their Gauloises and reading Camus, while the best you and I can do is suck on a cold Starbucks inside a soulless, neon-lit shop as we scroll through our dismal social media feeds wearing a hat? It reminds me of those t-shirts you sometimes see tiny-tots wearing after their grandparents have travelled and makes me think we could do with an adult’s version.
With that off my chest, let’s turn now to whether chap, that ultra-English word for man or fellow, is connected in any way to this whole headwear business.
It isn’t.
Chap is an abbreviation of chapman, an obsolete word meaning peddler or itinerant tradesman (and, later, customer). Its origins are in the Latin caupo, which also meant peddler. English, worried that people might think the word referred to, say, a badger wishing to conduct business, thoughtfully added man to avoid confusion. That the word has since been shortened to chap suggests that somewhere back in time our ancestors thankfully came to their senses.
Something I believe I will now mirror by capping off this week’s newsletter. Time for a cappuccino, perhaps. What could be more capital than that?
Bits and specious
A few dedicated souls still play piquet to this day, and by all accounts it’s a challenging game. You can find its rules here.
The world has an estimated 7000 or so languages. Half are spoken by 10,000 people or less, and that’s a problem.
Next time you overhear someone complaining that lax immigration laws mean “no one speaks English any more”, show them this article.
Another dreary case of Someone Who Should Know Better moaning about the verbifying of nouns and exhorting the rest of us to Stop Doing It. In this case, the word being moaned about, summer, has been used as a verb since the 15th century.
Quote of the week
I’m Catholic. My mother and I were unpacking and she found my diaphragm. I had to tell her it was a bathing cap for my cat.
Lizz Winstead
I think the PIE word spelling is purely phonetic, so they chose the symbol k for the [k] sound, hence *kaput for the PIE word (the * meaning that it is a reconstructed word, since there is no wrotten record of PIE). While in Layin they would use sometimes the letter c to also denote the sound [k], hence they would write caput. In fact, they rarely used the letter K for the sound [k].
Turns-of-phrase like "cap and collar" were among the most difficult aspects for me entering the business world. I was 25, high in confidence, low in skill, and had chosen to forgo formal business education, confident that my 7 years working at a non-profit organisation would be enough. I was wrong.
I tried to learn by reading the business pages or watching the TV business shows, and found only a blur of allegories and metaphors. So little of what we talk about in business - especially finance - is actually what it says it is.
Bearish or Bullish, market cap taking a haircut, boiling the ocean, putting boots on the ground ... the irony is that these phrases are said in a serious, businesslike way, as if we were not creating wild mixed metaphor word pictures in the minds of our readers.