Material abundance breeds linguistic abundance: well-heeled individuals with time on their hands and possessions galore often invent words that are, strictly speaking, both needless and redundant. One might, for example, simply store tea in a box, but one doesn’t, at least not if one wants to impress one’s dinner guests. Instead, one stores tea in a caddy, a rectilinear hinged device more commonly known as a box. Caddy appeared in the late eighteenth century as an alteration of catty, the English name of a weight used in China, equal to one-and-a-third pounds. Catty, in turn, was derived from the Malay-Javanese word kati, also denoting a weight. Caddy also has another gastronomic connection, though not one that is connected to the tea caddy. In the nineteenth century, a person who prepared horsemeat for human consumption was known as a caddy butcher. The origin of this caddy is unclear: it may have derived from cade, a rare but still extant word denoting an especially pampered lamb or colt. Alternatively, the horsemeat caddy might be connected to caddie, a name for young men engaged in various menial or low occupations, such as errand boy, messenger, or (since the mid nineteenth century) golf-club carrier. Caddies sometimes worked with horses as is suggested by the fact that an abbreviated form of the word, cad, became a common name for a driver of a horse and carriage; it’s possible that the word was transferred, over time, from the driver to the horse. This latter caddie derives from cadet, which in turn derives from a diminutive of the Latin caput, meaning head; thus, a cadet (or caddie) is literally a little head or more idiomatically a mini-captain.<\/p>\n
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Material abundance breeds linguistic abundance: well-heeled individuals with time on their hands and possessions galore often invent words that are, strictly speaking, both needless and redundant. One might, for example, simply store tea in a box, but one doesn’t, at least not if one wants to impress one’s dinner guests. Instead, one stores tea in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c"],"yoast_head":"\n