WTN: caboose
James Harbeck
caboose
When you were a kid, did you always wave at a caboose when you saw one?
There are four possible answers:
a) Of course!
b) That was before my time.
c) What’s a caboose?
d) Whaaaaaaaaaaaat? That would get me slapped!
Well, there is a fifth possible answer – “No” – but I think the only people who would say that would be ancient mariners. You see, though it’s now often used to mean, um, “booty,” caboose has gone on a long and interesting trip, starting in the same place you might find booty but perhaps on a higher deck. I mean that it started out as food storage, whereas now it’s, um… Let me put this another way: it was a place where you could really get cooking, whereas now it…
OK, let me be plain. A caboose, in the oldest sense we know of, was a shack built on a ship’s deck to house the stove and/or to store the food. It was used when there wasn’t a proper galley. The word is descended from Middle Dutch kombuys via French cambuse (and we’re not really sure where kombuys comes from; the etymons have the look of meaning ‘something-house’ but I’m not sure what the something would be. Also, although Portuguese comboio‘train’ has a certain resemblance, it’s unrelated – though it is related to convoy). Other descendants of these words (e.g., modern Dutch kombuis, Swedish kabyss, Italian cambusa) still generally name a food storage place or a cookhouse. But in English, in particular in Canada and the US, the word got on a different train.
It’s not that other countries don’t have trains, of course. But in North America, the long freight trains that covered long distances needed a crew car at the back, partly so someone could hop off and reset a switch once the train had passed over it, partly to give a place to look over the train and make sure that everything was OK with it (no load shifting, no damage, no fires, no detachment), partly to give a place to do paperwork and to sleep and cook, and they decided to call the car – which was originally just a cabin on a flatbed – a caboose, after the shipboard thing it first resembled. (It’s not that nowhere else in the world had similar cars; they just didn’t look quite the same, and they weren’t called cabooses.)
Cabooses are cute, especially the ones with the little cupola on top. The cupola is there so a crew member can look over the train; some cabooses instead had bay windows on the sides, and some had both. But there’s something very Richard Scarry about a little head poking up in a little cab on the top of a little red car at the end of a train. If you’re a kid and you see one, of course you wave! And maybe the train whistles back at you (probably not, though; you’re at the end away from the whistle).
Nowadays, though, you should neither wave nor whistle, for the only caboose you are likely to see on the average day is the rear end not of a train but of a person. The transference of sense is obvious – from back end to back end – and the word has a certain fun sound to it, complete with boo like in booty. But the train that got it there has moved on now. Train cabeese (sorry, cabooses) were legally required up to the 1980s, but improvements in train technology – which included not only cameras and sensors but also suitable room for crew quarters up in the engine – obviated them, and the train companies’ fiscal desires led to crew reductions, and so cabooses were written out of the law. And that made an end of them. So to speak.
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