The Latin or Romance languages often adopted Roman camp slang instead of the correct Latin word. Caput was "head" in Latin, but the Roman legionaries used testa, a round cooking pot, jokingly for "head".
This ancient slang migrated into French as tete and into Italian as testa. The correct Latin word for "head" (caput) survives as capo in Italian and is an American Mafia idiom for "head man" or "chief".
A further change of meaning of the Latin caput occurred in German, in which kaputt now means "wrecked" or "broken". Germanic burial squads in the Middle Ages counted each corpse as a "head", or caput, so the word became an expression, in German, of anything "broken", "wrecked", or "unserviceable".
Also interpreted as, "Treat him as you would a wild beast."
In Old English law, a person who was declared an outlaw (caput lupinum) could legally be hunted down and killed by anyone who might find him. This meant that a man could be hunted down as if he were a wolf or wild animal.
Who is she that hides her head in the clouds? The line is from Virgil, who had the personified Fame in mind as the subject of the verb condit. For most people, fame never emerges from behind the clouds; instead, most people labor in obscurity, waiting for their few minutes of fame that never comes.
In Old English law, the sign of an outlaw or criminal.
This was a term, or name, alchemists gave to worthless material that remained after their experiments; such as, residuum left after chemical analysis; worthless residue in a flask after the distillation was complete; by extension, "a worthless or useless person".
Those who to stir up enthusiasm for their hometowns may use caput mundi in the same way the Romans did; that is, Rome was considered the capital of the world.