captain

   This title is met with fairly frequently, since there are both military and civilian captains of various kinds. As an army rank, captain is above lieutenant and below major. Thus the high-ranking brigadier in The Facemaker, by Richard Gordon, is able to say: ‘Oh, do be quiet, Captain!’ to his subordinate officer. In the navy a captain ranks above a commander and below a commodore or rearadmiral.

   This means that a naval captain is on the same level as an army colonel, while an army captain is on the level of a naval lieutenant. In the USA ‘captain’ is also an air force and marine corps rank, similar to that of the army. The army, naval, and air force captains referred to above are all commissioned officers; ‘captain’ is also a title conferred on the master of any ship in the Royal or Merchant navies. In modern times the senior pilot of a civil aircraft is a captain. The title may also be met with in the fire or police department, where (in the USA) a captain ranks between a lieutenant and a chief. Since ‘captain’ basically means ‘head’, Latin caput being its etymon, the term is also used of the person who leads a sports team, the captain of a football team, for example. It is also used in restaurants and hotels of the person in charge of waiters or bellboys.

   Use of the term is even more widespread because ‘captain’ has been used since at least the beginning of the seventeenth century as a vaguely complimentary term of address to a male. There are many examples of such usage in the Shakespeare plays. Timon of Athens (2:ii) has the page saying to the fool: ‘Why, how now, Captain? What do you in this wise company? In The Winter’s Tale (l:ii) Leontes says to his son: ‘Come, Captain, we must be neat - not neat, but cleanly, Captain.’

   The plays also have many instances of army and naval captains being addressed by title, sometimes qualified as ‘noble captain’, ‘good captain’, ‘brave captain’. In King Henry the Fourth Part Two (2:iv) the Hostess addresses Pistol, who is Falstaff’s ensign, as ‘sweet captain’, but the term enrages Doll Tearsheet: Captain! Thou abominable damn’d cheater, art thou not ashamed to be called captain? An captains were of my mind, they would truncheon you out, for taking their names upon you before you have earn’d them. You a captain? You slave, for what? For tearing a poor whore’s ruff in a bawdy house? He a captain! hang him, rogue! He lives upon mouldy stew’d prunes and dried cakes. A captain! God’s light, these villains will make the word as odious as the word ‘occupy’; which was an excellent good word before it was ill sorted. Therefore captains had need look to’t.

   In Shaw’s Pygmalion Eliza Doolittle calls Colonel Pickering ‘captain’ when he is still a stranger to her, pronouncing it, Shaw tells us, as keptin. For her the term is equivalent to ‘governor’, conveying respect, though when she becomes convinced that Higgins is a detective who is about to arrest her, she thinks that this must be ‘because I called him Captain’. She pleads: ‘Oh, sir, don’t let him lay a charge agen me for a word like that.’ This kind of usage evidently continues. In his autobiographical Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck says that he offered a lift to ‘an old Negro’ when he was touring the country in 1960. ‘How are things going with you?’ Steinbeck asked him. ‘Fine, just fine, captain, sir.’ However, Steinbeck does say that while driving around he usually wore a British naval cap which once belonged to a friend. He was also bearded. Home, by Somerset Maugham, has:’ “Well, I’m glad to see you’ve got here safely, Mr Meadows.” “Captain,” he corrected,’ writes Maugham, the man concerned being a retired sea-captain. Loose pronunciation of the title is sometimes indicated by the spelling ‘Cap’n’, as in Doctor at Sea, by Richard Gordon. It occurs again in To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, when a lawyer in court asks a witness if his name is Robert Ewell. That’s m’name, cap’n,’ says the witness, at which the lawyer’s back ‘stiffened a little’. J.B.Priestley, in The Good Companions, uses the spelling ‘Cap’en’ and shows another misuse of the title: ‘You be off,’ said the policeman to Mr Oakroyd, ‘and leave him alone. And you get off home, sir, afore somebody else starts follering you. You’ve not far to go.’ ‘Ay, ay, Cap’en.’ And George gave another salute and zigzagged down the road. In very informal use, the abbreviation ‘Cap’ can occur. ‘What happened to your anchor, Cap?’ says a speaker in The Island, by Peter Benchley. This is also the normal term addressed to the captain of Edna Ferber’s Showboat. On the one-time fondness for bestowing military titles rather easily, see also Major and Colonel.