"We packed up the whole kit and caboodle and drove to Grandma's." Most of us have said something like it, meaning we brought absolutely everything. It's a fun phrase to say. But stop and think about it for a second: what exactly is a caboodle? Have you ever seen just one?
You haven't, because caboodle survives almost nowhere except in this phrase. "Kit and caboodle" grew out of an older expression, "kit and boodle," which was borrowed as a whole from the Dutch phrase kitte en boedel. Boedel is a Dutch word meaning property or estate. So when you say the whole kit and caboodle, you're really saying all your stuff and all your belongings.
From Boodle to Caboodle
The word boodle made its own way into English. It became a slang term for money, coming from that same Dutch word for property. It traveled into Afrikaans too, which probably explains why English-speaking South Africans have long used boodle to mean money.
In 19th-century America, boodle even turned up in the name of so-called boodle jails. For a small fee paid to an officer, tramps could stay there for the winter without actually being prisoners. The Welsh poet W. H. Davies spent winters in boodle jails in Michigan, passing the time with card games, singing, and reading.
Somewhere along the way, "kit and boodle" picked up an extra syllable and became "kit and caboodle." To English ears, kit already sounded like a set of gear, so the phrase fit right in.
A Fossil Word
Language experts have a great name for words like caboodle. They're called fossil words: words that have mostly fallen out of use but survive, preserved, inside a particular idiom or phrase.
English is full of them once you start looking. There's ado in "without further ado," beck in "at your beck and call," and dint in "by dint of hard work." We wait with "bated breath" and get our "just deserts," even though we rarely use bated or deserts that way anywhere else. Then there's eke, as in "eke out a living," and dudgeon, which only shows up when someone storms off "in high dudgeon."
A Whole Family of "Everything" Phrases
Americans love a good way to say "all of it." Along with the whole kit and caboodle, there's the whole nine yards, the whole ball of wax, the whole enchilada, the whole shebang, and going the whole hog. The British have their own version, "the full monty," whose origin remains a mystery.
Some of these have their own surprising histories. The whole ball of wax was first recorded in the 1880s. The whole nine yards first appeared as an idiom in 1907, in a small-town newspaper in Mitchell, Indiana.
Kits You Could Live In
Here's a fun side note. From 1908 to 1942, Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold more than 70,000 houses by mail order. The kits arrived by railroad boxcar with most of the materials needed to build a home. Families, friends, and neighbors often put them together, much like an old-fashioned barn raising. You might say buyers really did get the whole kit and caboodle.
So the next time you pack up everything for a trip, you can tell the family you're bringing the whole kit and caboodle, and then impress them with where the caboodle came from.
