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Literary Review
WORDSPEAK
The officer who commands
BY ANAND
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How ‘captain’ came to mean what it does in both the military and civilian worlds.
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Photo: Anu Pushkarna
Oldest military rank: Initially, one who stood at the head of other soldiers.
Apropos an observation in the previous month’s column whether “the irregular British (and Indian) pronunciation of lieutenant as ‘lef-ten’unt’ was preferable to its regular and more logical pronunciation ‘loo-ten&#
8217;unt’ that is common in the U.S. and in Canada,” an e-mail from reader James Parker of Victoria, B.C., Canada asserted that “As a current and 20-year member of the Canadian military, I can assure that we still pronounce ‘Lieutenant’ as ‘Left’enant.”
While I stand corrected, let me admit that my observation was based on hearsay, much like a conversation that I had overheard at a diplomatic reception about Europeans referring to the Turkish flower ‘lale’ as ‘tuliband’ after its shape reminded them of tuluban, the head-dress of the Ottoman Turks. The etymological history of tuliband becoming tulipa in Latin, source for tulip (the flower) in English and turban (the head-dress), led to a series of Wordspeak columns that were published several years ago in The Hindu.
Capital beginnings
Captain — in the sense of ‘a person who is at the head of or in authority over others’, which is one of the focal words in the present column — has its root (capitaneous) in Latin ‘caput’ or head. “The Root of Capital”, a Wordspeak column of not so distant yore, discussed how caput was also the source for ‘capital punishment’ and ‘capital offence’, and for such diverse terms as capital outflows, capital intensive and capital gains; for a country’s principal city with its seat of the government and administrative centre, and to point to the size and form of letters of the alphabet.
Just to recap, since it will help understand captain’s usage in the military sense, the letters of the alphabet ‘standing at the head’ of a sentence or a name, or ‘of the largest size’ came to be called ‘capital’ letters; ‘capital crimes’ in English law were at first crimes for which the offender’s head was cut off (decapitate = to cut off the head of a person); the chief or head city or town of a country was called ‘the capital city,’ and then, simply, ‘the capital’; capital for ‘wealth’ as a reference to one’s assets dates back to the times when a person’s wealth was counted in the number of head of cattle that he or she owned; and ‘cap’ as in a head covering is a derivative, though it is now employed also to mean ‘to set a limit’.
Non-military usage
In the non-military sense, The Captain of Our Salvation was a name given to God in Judaic-Christian literature because he was seen as the author and source of mankind’s salvation, the head of his people. Another Biblical reference is to the “captain of the temple” who was not a military officer, but superintendent of the guard of priests and Levites who kept watch in the temple by night.
In the times when an army was mainly a motley collection of mercenaries put together by feudatory chiefs, a captain was one who stood at the head of other soldiers. The military leader or the chief of all captains was “captain general”, which dwindled simply to general with the passage of time to mean the commander of an entire army. With the rise of nation states and large, permanent armies, a captain came to mean “officer who commands a company” (rank between major and lieutenant). More about majors later, when we deal with colonels and marshals.
Other applications
As a civilian term, captain, for someone in authority, over others was borrowed from the navy in 1704 to mean the “master or commander of a vessel of any kind”, as a sporting metaphor (“the captain of the cricket team”) it was first recorded in 1823. Gradually, we began applying the term to the pilot of an airplane, to the headwaiter in a restaurant and to the chief porter (bell captain) in a hotel, to an officer in some police forces, and to a figure in the forefront or a person of great power and influence (“a captain of industry”). In many languages of India, in Britain and in Southern U.S., it is also an unofficial title of respect for a man, and is sometimes used humorously or ironically.
As the oldest military rank for an officer, it is interesting to note that the term captain has survived more or less intact in most languages. A few examples: kaptajn (Danish), kapteeni (Finnish), capitaine (French), der Kapitän (German), kaptan (Turkish), kapitán (Slovak), capitán (Spanish). In Greek, Russian and several other alphabets, it is transcribed as in English.
E-mail: anand@journalist.com (Please put ‘Wordspeak’ in the
subject box.)
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