Hoods have been part of people’s wardrobes for a very long time. Long enough for some interesting etymology to show up. One interesting bit is “liripipe” — which is sometimes written as “liripoop”, although nobody seems to know why. If you wore a hood back in medieval England, you might have attached an ornamental dangly bit to its point — and that dangly bit was a “liripipe”. The word comes from the Latin “liripipium”, which seems to have meant several things, from a shoelace to a string to the inner sole of a shoe to the meaning English picked up, the tip of a hood.
Some of the Medieval people wearing hoods were academics, and that’s where the word “liripipe” has survived — barely. Some colleges and universities call the ceremonial sashes worn by graduates “liripipes”. You’ll note that a sash is not, of course, an extension attached to the point of a hood. Here’s what happened: over the years and centuries people started to make their liripipes longer and more elaborate. Eventually they became so long you could trip over them. This proved to be inconvenient, so the extra-long, extra-fancy liripipes began to be worn wrapped around the head instead.
Remember that if you had a liripipe, you already had a hood. So the liripipe wrapped around your head, which resembled a hat, began to be called a kind of hat. Specifically, the word “chapeau” (French for hat) was used as the root for the new word “chaperon”. For a couple of centuries European academics were professing about wearing chaperons, which were just long liripipes attached to their hoods. I suspect if they might have become a bit foggy about the original reason why they were wearing the hoods in the first place. They eventually started to wonder about that themselves, and around the 1400s the hoods began to disappear — as much because they were becoming unfashionable as anything. Academia is certainly not immune to fashion; just look into “deconstructionism in the late 1990s”.
Even when hoods faded from use, the idea of wrapping a long ornamental cord around your head somehow survived. The cords were technically no longer liripipes, since there was no hood to attach them to. But remember that there was already a newer term for a cord wrapped around your head: “chaperon.” By the 1600s “chaperons” were still being worn, but only by women. And by the 1700s “chaperon” was being used metaphorically to mean the protector of a young woman (who was typically an older married women, generally from the same family).
That brings us to the situation today; a “chaperone” is an older person watching over one or more younger ones, nobody remembers that it used to be a kind of thing you wore on your head and came from a string you tied onto the point of a hood you found yourself wearing for reasons you probably didn’t know. Sounds a little bit like some academic departments I recall…
The title quote is from the 1981 film Excalibur.
