When I was young, I spent some years trying to get somewhere as an actor. I did almost no professional work, but I did a lot of community theatre. I love community theatre. There’s no cachet and no cash, eh, but it’s so much fun and there’s such comradery. Erm, camaraderie, I mean.
Which reminds me of a play I was in called One for the Pot, a farce by Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton in which I played identical twin brothers (no, wait, identical triplets…) who were aiming to collect an inheritance. It had quite a bit of stagecraft and clever use of trapdoors and body doubles. I played Billy Hickory Wood, a likeable, not-too-bright Yorkshireman, and Rupert Hickory Wood, his long-lost brother who had a posh southern English upbringing (also Michael Hickory Wood, a wily Irish-raised brother, but he shows up halfway through). It occurs to me that Billy might be the sort to say (and write) comradery but Rupert would certainly be the sort to say and write camaraderie.
To be fair, comradery is much less commonly used, and seems to be more American. But to those with linguistic savoir-faire, it may seem to be an error – a vulgar reanalysis, a mere Americanization, taking a lovely French word that had been carried into English unchanged and stuffing it into those English britches. Why, camaraderie refers to sharing a room – it comes ultimately from Latin camera ‘room, chamber’, but passed through Spanish on its way to French; camarade was first a word for a soldiers’ dormitory, but then came to refer to those who slept in the dormitory, the brothers in arms. So it is a word for a certain esprit de corps! Whereas comrade, well…
…well, it comes from camarade, of course. And while it has gained a certain “communist” tinge by association, it is still used quite a bit for general companions and friends and comrades in arms. And there is quite a company of English words that end in -ry – scores and scores, such as artistry and devilry and gadgetry and peasantry and on and on. So comradery is a perfectly reasonable construction in English.
But it just happened to show up as a parvenu to claim the inheritance of its French doublet. Camaraderie has been in English at least since the 1840s, and comradery only since the, uh, 1870s.
Well, whatever. They are long-lost twins, with different cultural bearings, but both are worthwhile, even if they never seem to be seen in the same room together… ironically.
Speaking of which, by good fortune, someone brought a camera to a performance of that production of One for the Pot, and a couple of years ago I digitized it from a gradually degrading VHS tape. You can watch it, or anyway as much of it as you can bear (the sound and image quality are not to 2023 standards)…
Sesquiotica 