a question of vocabulary

[ritaxis]

What's the difference between a cantonment and an encampment?

Comments

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I am not looking up the technical difference; probably someone else knows it off the bat and will tell you. My back of the head belief as a reader is that a cantonment is more permanent than an encampment. If I think about it more, my impressions of the words are infected by the Swiss political canton and the song "Tenting on the Old Campground," and at that point I am no longer a useful source of data.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

And also there is a town in Florida called "Cantonment."

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Permanence, I think. 'Cantonment' feels almost distractingly Indian-subcontinent to me: the British built very permanent cantonments outside big Indian towns, which have ended up lending their names to quite major railway stations - so I've only ever seen 'cantonment' on the signs of stations that I've passed through on trains in India. Given where the British Empire was, the same thing happens in Pakistan.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I asked because this book I'm reading about the influenza epidemic of 1918 persistently refers to American Army camps built for the war as "cantonments." I had never even seen the word before! These are camps built on American soil, to gather and train soldiers before sending them to Europe. I'm not at all sure if they were intended to be temporary or permanent, only that at least most of the ones being talked about in the book are new.

The dictionary gave a definition with a temporary sense for cantonment first and a permanent sense second, especially in South Asia.

I thought it might be a cool word to use (yes, I do that, doesn't everybody sometimes?) but I'm thinking, now, that it doesn't work for what I'm doing.