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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
Sinclair Lewis, in ‘Main Street’, 1920:
This week it is..... The whole kit and caboodle
“...and some of these college professors are just about
A collection of things.
The words kit and caboodle have rather similar as bad, the whole kit and bilin’ of ‘em are nothing in
God’s world but socialism in disguise!”
meanings.
A kit - is set of objects, as in a toolkit, or what a soldier - The whole (or whool) boodle
From J. Neal’s, ‘Down-Easters’, 1833:
would put in his kit-bag.
A caboodle (or boodle) - is an archaic term meaning “I know a feller ‘twould whip the whool boodle of ‘em
an’ give ‘em six.”
group or collection, usually of people.
There are several phrases similar to the whole kit and From Bangor Daily Whig And Courier, Maine, 1839:
caboodle, which is first recorded in that form in 1884. “A whole squad have got to permit to see you.
Most of them are of US origin and all the early citations Who are they?
are American. Caboodle was never in common use I don’t know, a whole boodle of them.”
outside the USA and now has died out everywhere, apart - The whole caboodle
From the Ohio State Journal, 1848:
from its use in this phrase.
- The whole kit - the whole of a soldier’s necessaries, “The whole caboodle will act upon the recommendation
the contents of his knapsack. From Grose’s Dictionary of the Ohio Sun.”
Which brings us finally to the whole kit and caboodle
of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785.
From the Syracuse Sunday Standard, New York, Nov,
- The whole kit and boodle
Although this citation is slightly later than that of the 1884:
final ‘whole kit and caboodle’, it’s worth including as it “More audiences have been disappointed by him and
gives a 19th-century version of the meaning of the term. by the whole kit-and-caboodle of his rivals.”
It may still be a step along the way - either unrecorded It is most likely that these phrases were in use
before 1888 or recorded in an, as yet, undiscovered simultaneously and that there isn’t a clear parentage of
work. This piece, titled ‘The Origin of Boodle’, is from one to another. ‘Kit and caboodle’ had the advantage of
The Dunkirk Observer-Journal, New York, September the alliterative ‘k’ sound and that’s doubtless why it has
outlasted the others, which are now all fallen out of use.
1888:
“It is probably derived from the Old-English word bottel, What we can’t confirm is that the word caboodle migrated
a bunch or a bundle, as a bottel of straw. “The whole from boodle in order to sound better when matched
kit and boodle of them” is a New England expression with kit. It is possible that that’s what happened, but
in common use, and the word in this sense means the the dates of the known citations don’t support it. Whole
whole lot. Latterly, boodle has come to be somewhat kit and caboodle, (1884) is recorded before whole kit
synonymous with the word pile, the term in use at the and boodle, (1888) and whole caboodle comes well
gaming table, and signifying a quantity of money. In before both, in 1848. Perhaps that’s just the inadequacy
the gaming sense, when a man has “lost his boodle”, of either records or research and that citations with the
he has lost his pile or whole lot of money, whatever appropriate dates will emerge later.
amount he happened to have with him.”
- The whole kit and boiling (or bilin’)
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