'To set one's cap at someone': Head-Gear or Ship's Head?

Abstract

THE OED groups the once popular expression ‘to set one’s cap at someone’ in reference to ‘a woman who sets herself to gain the affections of a man’ with other idioms such as to cast one’s cap at ‘to show indifference to, give up for lost; to come, fall under, lie in one’s cap ‘to occur to, be in one’s mind’; to put on one’s thinking or considering cap ‘to take time for thinking over something’; the cap fits ‘the description or remark suits or is felt to suit (a particular person)’; to pull cap ‘to quarrel, wrangle, struggle together (? in a noisy or undignified way)’, and so on—all figurative uses of cap as a head covering.1 In the case of ‘to set one’s cap at’ we seem called on to imagine a young woman’s mobcap or such-like metonymically serving as a symbol of marriageability or marital ambition. The earliest attestation is from the third quarter of the eighteenth century in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer: ‘Instead of breaking my heart at his indifference, I’ll … set my cap to some newer fashion, and look out for some less difficult admirer’.2 The pairing of ‘cap’ and ‘fashion’ suggests that the author would have supported the dictionary’s association. A half-century later, Byron writes of ‘Some, who once set their caps at cautious dukes’.3 The current understanding of the now rather dated phrase continues to associate it with a cap as head-gear, despite the lack of understanding of just what the basic image should involve.