🎶 But if baby, I'm the bottom, You're the Top! 🎶 - Words Built on CAP (pt. 2)

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In a previous Root of the Week blog post, we looked at English words deriving from the Latin word “capabilis,” meaning “able to,” especially “able to hold” or “able to contain,” and from a related word, “capere,” meaning “to grasp,” “to take in,” or “to comprehend.”  The morpheme CAP also appears in another group of words derived from “caput,” meaning “head.”  As we will see, a version of “caput” also takes the form of “ceps,” which also means “head.”

MONDAY - Capital  (noun & adjective)

Capital has many meanings in English, all related to the Latin root “caput” or “head.”  In architecture, a capital is the uppermost part (the head) of a column or pillar.  A city is designated the capital of a state or country if it is the place where government (the head of the body politic) meets. A capital crime in a legal system is the most serious kind of crime and carries the most serious penalty. CAPITAL letters are upper case letters.  Over time, capital also evolved into a word denoting wealth.

TUESDAY - Capo (noun)

If you watch gangster movies, you know that a capo is the head of a crime family—the one whose offers you can’t refuse.  In the world of music, a capo is a clamp that fits over the neck of a stringed instrument, like a guitar, to shorten the strings and thus change the key.  Is it a capo/head because it is on the instrument’s “neck”?  That I don’t know. 

WEDNESDAY - Decapitate (verb)

The prefix “de,” from Latin, means “off, away,” and also carries the sense of undoing or reversing something. So clearly “de” + “capitate” means “behead,” “to take the head off.” Sometimes the word is used metaphorically, as when an army “decapitates” a rebel group by removing its commander.

THURSDAY - Capitulate, Recapitulate (verb)

In Latin, the verb “capitulare” means “to draw up in chapters,” that is, in a piece of writing that comes under a “heading.” The English word “capitulate” means “to acquiesce” or “to surrender on stipulated terms” and is related to the head/chapter business because it originally referred to coming to terms with an enemy on terms that were drawn up in writing.

The Latin prefix “re” indicates “to do again, to repeat,” but recapitulate, strangely enough, does NOT mean “to surrender again.” Instead, it refers to that meaning of a piece of writing under a “heading” and means “to sum up, to tell again.” A colloquial shortening of recapitulate is recap, which is used both as a verb (“Our sports reporter will recap the latest WNBA game”) and as a noun (“Give us a quick recap of the game today.”)

FRIDAY - Ceps (Latin)

While not an English word on its own, the root cap also shows up in Latin as ceps and also means “head.” Ceps appears in English words having to do with muscles. In Latin, “bi” means “two,” so your biceps, the upper arm muscle that bends your elbow, is named after its two heads.  The biceps brachii literally means “the two-headed muscle of the arm.”  It’s called that because the muscle has two points of origin, at different places on the shoulder blade, and a single point of insertion, on the upper arm bone. Although the word ends in an “s”, it is used as a singular. Your outer arm also had a three-headed muscle, which straightens the elbow and is called the triceps.