Friday words #302

I recently read a crime novel in which an inexperienced police officer is referred to as a slick sleeve. This is a term that originated in the military to refer to someone who has no stripes or designation of rank on their sleeve.

In the military and in many police forces and fire departments, the uniform can include stripes to indicate length of service. For example, in the US Army, you earn one service stripe for every three years of service.

A slick sleeve also has no rank designation, meaning that they’re at the lowest rank of their outfit—a recruit. After the recruit has gone through training and whatnot, they achieve basic rank. For example, in the US Army, it’s Private; in the US Air Force, it’s Airman; in police forces, it’s usually something like Trooper or Police Officer First Class. Once the person has achieved a rank, they wear a rank designation on their sleeve.

The rank designation for many services—including the US Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, and many police and fire departments—is a chevron, which is the word I actually got interested in this week. (I should note that chevrons are used to mark rank for the lower ranks; once you get into commissioned officers, the insignia are different.)

A chevron is a badge in a wide V shape. Here are the chevrons that indicate rank in the US Army, where each additional chevron indicates more rank:

Fun fact: in different services, the chevron points in different directions (up or down). In fact, the Army has changed its mind over time about which way the chevron should point. These days it points up, but in the 19th century it pointed down. 

The word chevron also comes up in other contexts, though it pretty much always refers to the same shape. It’s used in heraldry, where it’s one of the “chief images in many coats of arms,” to quote Wikipedia. Fabrics are sometimes woven in a chevron weave, like herringbone. In typography, angle brackets ( ⟨ and ⟩ ) are also called chevrons; typographers will point out that chevrons are not the same as less-than and greater-than symbols (< and >).

Chevrons also appear in logos. The French car company Citroën has always used chevrons in its logo:

Of course, we also know the Chevron Corporation, a huge energy company, whose logo is, well, a chevron. The company got that name in the 1930s after a series of corporate acquisitions, break-ups (it was once part of Standard Oil), and rebrandings. The original logo was a three-stripe chevron, but these days they use a two-stripe one:

I tried to find out why they’d chosen that name and logo back in the 1930s, but that information is not easy to come by, even on their company history page. John Kelly has an interesting theory on his Mashed Radish blog. The company now known as Chevron takes credit for having invented what we call a service station (gas station, petrol station). Kelly muses that maybe the name Chevron and the logo might have been a kind of wordplay on “service”—people in the service wear chevrons, and the oil company had service stations. This could also explain the red, white, and blue color theme that they’ve always used.

Where do we get the word chevron from, anyway? From French, you won’t be surprised to hear. The original French meant “rafter,” because the joints of rafters form (inverted) V’s. The OED’s first English definition (i.e., the oldest) for chevron is “rafter,” but they somewhat pointedly add “There is but little evidence of the actual use of this in English.” After that, the definitions for chevron in English are all the ones we know today.

The best part is that chevron in French comes from caprione in Latin, meaning “goat.” To quote Douglas Harper: “the hypothetical connection between goats and rafters being the animal’s angular hind legs.”

How delightful. This means the chevron is related to chevre cheese and to Capricorn. It’s also related to cab (short for cabriolet, a type of carriage that had an “elastic bounding motion,” per the OED) and to caper, a “frolicsome leap.”

Now that I know that a sergeant’s stripes are somehow connected to the frolicsome goat, I might never look at a military uniform quite the same way again.

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