U.S. Air Force Academy cadets at graduation, 2009. Rows of men and women in uniform marching.
25 July 2022
A cad is a disreputable and dishonest person; a caddie is someone who carries golf clubs for a player; and a cadet is one training to be a military officer. While all three have very different meanings, the words stem from the same root.
Cadet is a sixteenth-century borrowing from French and originally carried the meaning of a younger son or brother of a noble family. It ultimately, via various French dialects, comes from a diminutive of the Latin caput, or head; a younger scion of a family is a “little head.”
The word appears in English by 1548, when historian Edward Hall uses it in reference to the younger son of a French noble. He is writing about the 1441 siege of the French town of Tartas by English forces, and the cadet in question is Charles d’Albret, the fourth son of Charles II d’Albert:
The Englishe capitaines beyng in Guyen, hauyng knowledge of the valeau[n]t doynges of their countreymen in the realme of Frau[n]ce, determined to do some notable and noble enterprise, on the French costes adioynyng to Aquitayn: & so, thei besieged the strong toune of Tartas belongyng to the lorde Delabreth, their old and auncient enemie. The capitaines and gouernors of the toune, consideryng their weakenesse, and the force of the Englishemen, toke this appoyntment with the Englishe capitaines, that the toune should remain neuter, and for the assuraunce therof, thei deliuered Cadet the sonne of the lorde Delabreth in pledge.
A century later it appears in James Howell’s 1651 Survay of the Signorie of Venice, where cadet is generalized and not used specifically in reference to France:
She hath allso another politic law that permitts not the younger sonnes of the Nobility and Gentry to marry, lest the nomber encreasing so exceedingly it should diminish the dignity, and her great Councell shold be too much pester'd, and this may be one reason why she connives at so many Courtisans for the use of the Cadett-gentlemen.
The OED, in an older entry, places this citation under the sense of one training to be a military officer, but there is nothing here to indicate that it means anything other than a younger son. I suspect this error will be corrected when the entry is updated.
But we do see the military connection the following year when John Evelyn uses it in The State of France. Cadets would enter the military seeking commissions because, not being able to inherit lands or title, they had few other prospects:
And to the stronger twisting of this Cord, such prudence hath been had of late times, that all those great and powerful houses remain now no more divided (as still amongst the Princes of Italy and Germany) the Cadets and yonger Brothers, minding for the most part no greater preferments, then what they cut out with their sword, and merit in Field by being Soldiers of Fortune.
Of course, cadets developed a bad reputation, often being the young, dissolute sons of nobility. We see this reputation, along with the slang abbreviation cadee, in Aphra Behn’s 1690 play The Widdow Ranter. The play is set during Bacon’s rebellion in 1675 Virginia. The colonists, many of whom had demanded commissions in the army in order to drive the Indigenous inhabitants from Virginia, rebelled against the British governor who had refused them. The rebellion was suppressed but was the first such revolt against English rule in North America. In the play, one such cadet speaks to his prisoner:
Nay I'm resolv'd to keep thee here till his Honour the General comes,—what to call him Traytor, and run away after he had so generously given us our freedom, and Listed us Cadees for the next command that fell in his Army.
And cadee also appears in the 1699 slang dictionary the New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew:
Cadet, or Cadee, a Gentleman that Bears Arms in hopes of a Commission; also a younger Brother.
By the late eighteenth century, however, the position of cadet was formalized in many armies. The growing importance of artillery on the battlefield, a branch of service that required considerable technical skill and training and could not be entrusted to just any son of a nobleman, created the need for military training academies. One such academy in Spain is noted in a 1779 travelogue by Henry Swinburne:
The royal apartments are now occupied by a college of young gentlemen cadets, educated at the king’s expence in all the sciences requisite for forming an engineer. The grand master of the ordnance resides at Segovia, which is the head establishment of the Spanish artillery.
But while cadet lost, or never strongly acquired, the connotation of disrepute, the form cadee or caddie continued to carry it. This sense was especially developed in Scotland, where caddie or cawdy extended to include not just the sons of nobility, but any young man or woman who sought employment. Scottish cities and towns regularized corps of caddies to run errands or do other odd jobs. Englishman Edward Burt, while visiting Scotland, notes this practice in a 1754 letter:
I then had no Knowledge of the Cawdys, a very useful Black-Guard, who attend the Coffee-Houses and publick Places to go of Errands; and though they are Wretches, that in Rags lye upon the Stairs, and in the Streets at Night, yet are they often considerably trusted, and, as I have been told, have seldom or never proved unfaithful.
These Boys know every body in the Town who is of any kind of Note, so that one of them would have been a ready Guide to the Place I wanted to find; and I afterwards wondered that one of them was not recommended to me by my new Landlady.
This Corps has a kind of Captain or Magistrate presiding over them, whom they call the Constable of the Cawdys, and in case of Neglect or other Misdemeanor he punishes the Delinquents, mostly by Fines of Ale and Brandy, but sometimes corporally.
“The Blackheath Golfer,” 1790 engraving by Lemuel Francis Abbott. A gentleman in late eighteenth-century dress with a golf club over his shoulder. Behind him stands a caddie carrying more golf clubs.
And by the mid nineteenth century, the sense of errand runner had specialized to refer to someone who carried a player’s golf clubs. The 1845 New Statistical Account of Scotland records this usage and notes the connotation of disrepute:
It is much to be deplored, however, that an exercise in itself sufficiently stimulating, should frequently be prostituted to the purposes of gambling, and that so many of the young who are employed as cadies or club-carriers, should be initiated in the practices of vice partly from the evil example of those in whose gambling transactions they take a deep interest, and whom they in this respect on a smaller scale ludicrously imitate, and partly from the mistaken liberality of their employers, who, by extravagantly overpaying them for their services, not only furnish them with the means of vicious indulgence, but totally unfit them for the sober and steady industry of any laborious calling.
Perhaps influenced by the Scottish usage, or perhaps just a development of the idea that a cadet of noble family would never hold a title, early nineteenth-century university slang in England clipped the word to cad and used it to refer to townspeople, especially those who hired themselves out to students. This use is noted in Pierce Egan’s 1821 edition of his Real Life in London:
Cambridge is but a short distance from that place of sporting notoriety, Newmarket, consequently it is next to impossible but that a youth of an aspiring mind should be up to all the manœuvres of a race course—understanding betting, hedging off, crossing and jostling, sweating and training—know all the jockeys—how to give or take the odds—lay it on thick, and come it strong. Some have an unconquerable ambition to distinguish themselves as a whip, sport their tits in tip top style, and become proficient in buckish and sporting slang—to pitch it rum, and astonish the natives—up to the gab of the cad.
Hence, a cad being a commoner, someone who could never be a gentleman, a disreputable person.
Sources:
An Amateur (pseudonym of Pierce Egan). Real Life in London, vol. 2 of 2. London: Jones & Co., 1821, 519. Adam Matthew: London Low Life: Street Culture, Social Reform and the Victorian Underworld.
B.E. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew. London: W. Hawes, et al. 1699. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Behn, Aphra. The Widdow Ranter, or the History of Bacon in Virginia. London: James Knapton, 1690, 40. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Burt, Edward. Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, vol. 1 of 2. London: S. Birt, 1754, 26–27. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Evelyn, John. The State of France. London: T.M. for M.M.G. Bedell and T. Collins, 1652, 85. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. cad, n.1.
Hall, Edward. The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke. London: Richard Grafton, 1548, fol. 142r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Howell, James. A Survay of the Signorie of Venice (alt. title S.P.Q.V.) London: Richard Lowndes, 1651, 7. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
The New Statistical Account of Scotland, vol. 1 of 15. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1845, 287. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cadet, n.1, cad, n.4.
Scottish National Dictionary (SND). s.v. caddie, n.1, v. Dictionaries of the Scots Language, 2022.
Swinburne, Henry. Travels Through Spain. London: P. Elmsly, 1779, 407. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Image credits: Dave Ahlschwede, 2009, U.S. Air Force photo, public domain image; Lemuel Francis Abbott, 1790, public domain image.