Stationary Capitol

I was driving recently along a street near my house in Sacramento, which is the capital of California, and saw a sign for capital nursery. While the words constitute the name of the business, they were not capitalized on the sign, which got me thinking: “What’s the difference between capital and Capitol? And why?” Another blog in the making.

I found out that Capitol (capitalized with an “o”) refers only to the building where Congress meets. It was used by Thomas Jefferson in 1793 and derived from the Latin Capitolium, which is the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (sounds like a Transformer) in ancient Rome. While early usage extended to Virginia state houses, the word Capitol has not been extended to centers of state government. And it is always capitalized.

Instead, for states the word is capital, and its history and usage precedes Jefferson’s use of Capitol. While capital was first used in the 1660s to refer to the city where the government resides, its history goes back further. (In fact, the noun form in Old English is heafodstol. How that translates to capital I don’t know.)

It makes sense that the city where the head of the government resides is called the capital because the word comes from the Latin word caput, which means “head”. The word capital came to English from Latin in the 13th century, from the Latin word capitalis. Capitalis means “of the head” so the various meanings for capital all have some sense of primary or top. A capital offense is one that affects life (historically by decapitation – another word that comes from caput.) Even a capital letter usually is the first letter, the head of the word.

Now that I’ve made that differentiation in my mind, perhaps history can help me remember the difference between stationary and stationery. Because I just looked it up in my dictionary I know that stationary refers to something not moving, and stationery refers to writing materials, specifically paper and envelopes used for letters.

According to my dictionary, stationary came from the Middle English word stacionarye, which came from the Latin word stationarius, a form of the word statio, from which we also get the word station. It came to English in the early 15th century, originally in reference to planetary movements.

Stationery comes to English much later, in 1727. It was derived from referring to “stationery wares,” or the items for sale by a stationer, a word much more commonly in use in the early 1700s than now. A stationer was a seller of books and paper, which in 14th century Middle Latin was stationarius, or “stationery seller”.

Etymonline.com adds some interesting additional information. In the Middle Ages, when this word came into usage in English, “roving peddlers” were common. Those with fixed (they avoided using the word stationary) locations were usually associated with and licensed by universities. “The Company of Stationers, one of the Livery Companies of the City of London, was founded 1556.”

Michael Quinion (worldwidewords.org) tells a little more of the etymology that etymonline only refers to: “In medieval times a stationarius was a trader who had a fixed station — a shop — rather than travelling from fair to fair, like a pedlar. These were usually booksellers (whose stock was too bulky to be carried about) and were mostly linked to the medieval universities, which is why such an elevated Latin word came to be attached to them. It became stationer in English, a form that’s recorded from the fourteenth century.” A station where books and writing items were sold was a stationer, and what they sold stationery.

Remembering that a stationer (you wouldn’t spell it with an “a”) sells stationery helps me remember which one to use: the one with the “a” or the one with the “e”. Several websites gave the mnemonic device of “e” refers to envelopes, so now you have two ways to remember.