Kaput: From Beginning to End

The remnants of a weekend study session.

I spend most of my time working with words. Four of my five classes revolve around writing or the study of language.
Outside of class I'm a copy editor for the student newspaper.
In my free time I read about language and storytelling techniques.
Most of my study, both for work and pleasure, is fairly standard. I work out the kinks in my grammar or read about good and bad examples of foreshadowing.
Sometimes, though, I like to take a break from the serious stuff and follow an interesting factoid down the linguistic rabbit hole.

For instance, in an excerpt of his book "Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks" posted to Slate, Keith Houston discusses the origin of the pilcrow (¶).

Once upon a time in Rome a "K" was used to mark the beginning of a new idea in a written work. The "K" represented kaput, the Latin word for head.

You might recognize "kaput" as being a word of German origin that means to be finished or broken.

Considering the huge differences in meaning, I was curious to see if the words were at all related.

One of the tricky parts of studying language is avoiding false friends, words that sound alike but mean very different things. They can trip you up when you least expect it.

I expected a quick Google search to reveal drastically different origins for the word, but I was surprised.

This "kaputt" is ultimately derived from the Latin. It took a very long road to get here and consequently changed quite a bit a long the way.

The German "kaput" comes from the French phrase "faire capot" meaning to be out of tricks in a card game, essentially to be hoodwinked.

A capot is a hooded cloak. In the original French, so is a cape.
From "cape" we can step back into Latin and find ourselves again at "kaput."

It starts off "kaput" or "caput" then changes to "capitulum." Then it jumps to the French "cape" and then to "capot." Then we get "faire capot," and from it we get the German "kaputt." Finally, we arrive at the English "kaput."

From beginning to end, that's how "kaput" got to the English language, and this is how I spend my free time.