cad/cadet/caddie

If a trainee army officer offers to carry your golf clubs and then steals them, which of these words would you use to describe him? Well, all of them of course, because they’re one and the same person. Originally, a cadet, ultimately from the Latin capitellum, “little head”, meant “chief”. It came to mean “younger brother” in the Gascon dialect of French, through the practice of the younger brother in a family entering the army to train to become an officer, and was borrowed into English in the 17^th century with the meaning of “officer trainee”.

In Scotland, cadet came to refer to a young man who entered the military without a commission. These young men were used to carry golf clubs, hence caddie, preserving the original French pronunciation. Caddie had also been used to denote and errand boy or porter, and eventually a passenger on a coach who travels without a ticket. The final meaning of cad probably arose through a derogatory reference to the local people by students at Oxford University. It just goes to show, you never know in which direction a word is “heading”.