Pylimitics

To “capitulate” means to surrender. But to “recapitulate” doesn’t mean surrender again; it means to sum up. So what the heck is up with that? 

It all goes back to the original Latin behind “capitulate;” it comes from “caput”, which means head. The diminutive form is “capitulum”, which, being a diminutive, means “little head.” It was commonly used to mean the section heading, or chapter title, in a book. The word “chapter” comes from “capitulum” too. Back in the 1500s, to “capitulate” simply meant to divide a book or document into sections with subheadings. 

One of the kinds of documents you might capitulate, of course, would be a treaty. Apparently quite a number of treaties were capitulated in the 1500s and 1600s — so many that by the late 1600s the meaning of “capitulate” had changed from “divide a document into sections” to “draw up a treaty”, and finally, it simply meant to surrender so you needed a treaty.

However, during the same period, “recapitulate” was also in use, and it meant to go over a document a second time and summarize it by restating the main points and section headings. That’s basically what “recapitulate” still means, although nowadays it’s not so much applied just to documents. If you include its shortened form “recap”, it’s probably used as much in broadcast sports and news programs as anywhere else. It even seems sometimes that you could totally procrastinate and skip the main part of the broadcast, just tuning in for the recap.

On the other hand, you might want to get all your burdensome viewing over and done with, so you might tune in early, watch the main points, then when the recap is about to appear, just turn it off, since you already know what the recap is going to include. That would be the opposite of procrastination. Which, by the way, is called precastination! It’s a fairly recent word invented to mean doing something right away in order to avoid the sense of being obligated to do it later. It’s a very pracademic way of looking at your tasks. “Pracademic” is a combination of “practical” and “academic,” and it’s almost unknown outside of academic circles, but it’s in reasonably common use within those circles. It just means a person (or an approach) that combines the practical and scholarly. 

A pracademic sort of person would not, I suspect, be in the least rodomontade; that would go against both their practical and the scholarly impulses. As you’ll no doubt recall, Rodomont was the name of the King of Algiers in a couple of centuries-old Italian epics: Orlando Innamorato (1485) and Orlando Furioso (1516). Rodomont was an incorrigible braggart, and John Donne was the first to use the word (in 1612), after which it turned up pretty frequently in literature over the next two or three centuries. Anne Bronte used it in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: “…he, poor fool, deludes himself with the notion that she’ll make him a good wife, and because she has amused him with some rodomontade about despising rank and wealth in matters of love and marriage…” If that doesn’t seem clear at first glance, feel free to recapitulate.