Tool Gloat

Associate Dave (formerly the combat plumber recently back from his year-long gig with KBR in the Green Zone) called me not ten minutes after I had returned from le Grande Orange to ask me about the Dewalt DW708 Dual Bevel 12" MS of which HD on US290 had four NIB sitting on the floor and marked down to $384.30. I admitted that I hadn't noticed them though I did see a couple or three standard 12" MS marked down a paltry $20 to $279. Dubai Dave told me he was gonna get hisself one and I said I'd meet him there and I did. And, I bought it. Near as I can remember HD had been carrying them for $569. In fact, the display slider they now have is a DW718 (w/laser) what has the dual slide bars mounted side-by-side vs. the over/under configuration of the 708. The DW718 is HD priced at $649. So, with two saws on our cart I collared Merina Joy who was hawking HD credit card apps at the main entrance to gimme one (and she did) which got me another 10% off up to two +extra large" on my first purchase. Pretty damn good I'm thinking. With all the discounting going on Bagdadh Dave and I decide to up the ante and spring for HD's RIGID MS-UV, that's Miter Saw Utility Vehicle (Model AC 9440) which goes for $149 but (you guessed it) we're gonna get $15 off that. So, I put the whole kit and kaboodle on the new charge giving Iraqi Dave the additional 10%, too. Dave later lays five new Benjamin Franklins on me along with twenty bucks worth of worn and dog-eared fives and ones and everybody is happy. It's a win-win deal!

In case you were wondering...have heard this so many times and was just wondering about it myself:

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[Q] From Elma Brooks: ³What is the source of the whole kit and kaboodle?² [A] Caboodle has a complicated history. It¹s been spelt down the years in many different ways, and these days is usually listed in dictionaries with an initial ³c². It means a collection of objects, sometimes of people. It commonly turns up in the whole caboodle, meaning ³the whole lot². It¹s recorded in the US from the middle of the nineteenth century. It¹s probable that the word was originally boodle, with the phrase being the whole kit and boodle, but that the initial sound ³k² was added to boodle for euphony.

There are examples of similar phrases around the beginning of the nineteenth century, such as whole kit and boiling (or whole kit and bilin¹) and whole kit and cargo, with the original very likely to have just been the whole kit?it¹s recorded in this form in Grose¹s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785. It was also current in the US as the whole boodle from the 1830s. It seems that the whole kit and caboodle eventually won the linguistic battle for survival in the US because of that repeated ³k² sound, though Dialect Notes in 1908 said that these other versions were still known from various parts of the country. Sinclair Lewis used one of them in Main Street in 1920: ³The whole kit and bilin¹ of ¹em are nothing in God¹s world but socialism in disguise².

(Lou here: always liked that SL!)

Boodle is familiar as the relatively modern US word for money illegally obtained, particularly linked to bribery and corruption. This is usually suggested as coming from the Dutch boedel, ³inheritance, household effects; possessions². But it¹s uncertain whether it¹s the same word as the one in the whole kit and boodle. Some writers suggest the latter comes from the English buddle, meaning a bundle or bunch (closely connected with bindle, as in the North American bindlestiff for a tramp). As kit here means one¹s equipment, to put the two together in the sense of everything that one has, equipment and personal possessions, seems reasonable.

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