WTN: capade
James Harbeck
capade
You know what a capade is, right?
You’ve seen capade in various places, I’m sure, often in the plural: horse-capades, lunch-capade, bike-capades, sexcapade, Borscht Capades, mice-capade, and of course Ice Capades. So it’s obviously a word. You hear it, you have the vibes of it, it’s cromulent, like classiomatic.
Only it’s not quite like classiomatic, because it’s not a mondegreen. It’s more like copter or -aholic. But not exactly like those, either, because it does have etymological morphological integrity.
Let me explain that bit. The word (or combining form) copter is shortened from helicopter, taken as being made of heli plus copter, though it’s really from helico (‘spiral’) plus pter (‘wing’). Similarly, the suffix -oholic or -aholic, as in chocoholic or workaholic, is taken from alcoholic, taken as being alco plus oholic or aholic. We know, of course, that alcoholic is from alcohol plus -ic. But alcohol traces back to Arabic al kuhl (‘stibnite powder’). So, like copter, -oholand -oholic is a rebracketing by reanalysis. We split a word and took something as an independent part that’s not an independent part.
But with capade it’s not a rebracketing. No morpheme was broken to make this word.
Yes, the first use of capade that all these other uses are taking it from is Ice Capades, the famous touring figure skating company that started in 1940, folded in 1991, and was revived briefly by Dorothy Hamill in 1993 and very briefly by Almut Lehmann Peyper in 2000, since when it has been an ex-capade. If you’re over a certain age, you very well may have seen the Ice Capades. I remember seeing them in Calgary starring Karen Magnussen circa 1980. My wife also saw the Ice Capades when she was a kid. And in 1991, she joined the Ice Capades as a cast member (after it folded, she joined Holiday on Ice). It’s tempting to say she ran away and joined the show, but while she did escape from the ordinary life in Toronto to travel the world (not quite a holiday, but an ice time was had), she didn’t actually elope per se. (Nor did she when she married me nearly a decade later.)
OK, so where did the Ice Capades get capade? You probably know the answer, but let’s say for a moment that you don’t, so you look it up. If you look up capade in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find it as an obsolete word (related to cap) from hat-making, referring to what is commonly called a bat, a felted mass of fur or of hair and wool. And I’m sure, what with the many headpieces worn in their glamour numbers, there were such capades involved in the Ice Capades. But no, that’s not it. And so perhaps you go to Wiktionary, where you find that it is, in Galician, the second-person imperative of the verb capar, which means ‘castrate’. In other words, if you say it in Galician, you’re ordering several people to castrate. But no, that is not where Ice Capades got it.
No, of course, Ice Capades is a pun on escapades. You know what an escapade is; Wiktionary defines it as “A daring or adventurous act; an undertaking which goes against convention.” Sort of like going off to spend your twenties travelling the world with an athletic glamorous entertainment troupe. And that does carry with it escape, of course; the word escaped to English from French, where escapade first referred to the act of escaping, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally, and French got it via Spanish escapada, from escapar (‘escape’), ultimately from Vulgar Latin excappare, which etymologically meant ‘get out of a cape or cloak’. (So if a Romulan bird of prey cloaks to escape, that’s paradoxical.) The root in that, cappa, is also the source of cap, the same one that shows up in that obsolete hat word capade. But it is not related to that Galician word. No, it is not.
So anyway, the morpheme division in escapade is es-cap-ade, and so capade is not a rebracketing. And etymologically you could say capade refers to being caped or cloaked, or perhaps otherwise costumed. Which the performers in the Ice Capades were (not very heavily, of course, just enough that you can caper in them). But in the main, a capade is – to get to it at long last – an entertainment extravaganza, or an adventure, or some other thing that guarantees an ice time for all.
Please send comments, replies, and suggestions for words to taste to me to ja...@harbeck.ca.
Feel free to pass this on to friends. If you've received it as a forward, feel free to join the Word Tasting Notes email list at http://groups.google.ca/group/word-tasting-notes .
Visit my blog at http://sesquiotic.wordpress.com .