Gramer girl here, I'm Minyon Fogarty.

This week I have a quick and dirty tip about the words capitulate and recapitulate, and

a meaty middle about how to use colons.

A listener named Chris asked why capitulate means to give up, but recapitulate means

to summarize and what a great question.

Why does the meaning of recapitulate to summarize seems so different from the meaning of capitulate

to surrender when the only difference seems to be the RE prefix?

The answer gives us a fascinating look at how the meaning of words can change over time.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, capitulate actually does come from a Latin word

that in the 700s meant to summarize.

In an extension of that meaning, by the 1100s it meant to arrange things into chapters,

and in fact, the same Latin word also gives us the English word chapter.

Somehow arranging things into chapters led to another extension of meaning to arrange

conditions.

In the 1300s capitulate meant to hold an assembly, and by the 1400s it meant to stipulate

in an agreement.

In the 1500s capitulate and recapitulate both entered English, and the OED and the online

etymology dictionary agree that at that time people started using capitulate to talk

about drawing up terms, conditions, and agreements.

And by the 1600s it referred to surrendering because when you surrender you usually write

up or agree to terms of surrender.

The capitulate didn't go through the same evolution and kept closer to the earlier

...