travestire

Italian travestire means 'to disguise,' from trans- ('across') and vestire ('to clothe'). A travestimento was a disguise — literally, a cross-dressing. In 17th-century Italian theater, a travesti was a burlesque in which serious works were rewritten with characters in absurd costumes, gods speaking in dialect, and heroes behaving like fools. The comedy was in the mismatch between the dignified original and the ridiculous version.

French parodists adopted travesti as a literary term. Paul Scarron's Le Virgile Travesti (1648-1652) rewrote the Aeneid as a burlesque comedy. The word named the specific genre: a serious work rewritten in a comic or grotesque style. The original was recognizable beneath the disguise. That was the point — the gap between the noble source and the ludicrous imitation.

English borrowed travesty from French in the 1670s. For two centuries, it meant a grotesque or debased literary imitation. Then, in the late 19th century, the meaning shifted again. 'Travesty' began to mean any grotesque distortion or mockery — not necessarily intentional, not necessarily funny. 'A travesty of justice' was not a parody. It was a failure.

Today, 'travesty' almost always means something that is shockingly bad — a disaster, a betrayal of what should have been. The theatrical costume change is gone. The comedy is gone. What remains is the sense of something important being degraded. The word that meant 'changed clothes' now means 'ruined.'