"Toolkit" (was Re: Heard on "Law & Order: CI")

[Jonathan Lighter]

Can't recall any early equivalent of the anthropological "toolkit."  Probably just "among the tools they used were" (rather than "The Neandertal [sic] toolkit included....").

  It would be interesting (God knows why) to know how far back this goes. I don't know when I first noticed it, but it was possibly during the '80s. Which means nothing.

  At any rate, it's very common now.  Anthro guys on cable use it constantly.

  JL


"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: "Toolkit" (was Re: Heard on "Law & Order: CI")
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On Oct 26, 2006, at 11:33 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:

> One of my senseless peeves

man, are you peevish!

> is the endemic (that means "as a term-of-art') use of "toolkit" by
> anthropologists to designate "the range of implements and tools
> available to a (usually extinct) form of the genus _Homo_." Roughly.

what (technical) term did they use before? or did they actually just
say "range of implements and tools available to a form of Homo"?

"tool ensemble" would be possible, but i don't think it's been used.
"toolkit" strikes me as a nice choice.

> Reading or, worse, hearing it turns me into a berserk primitive.
> Why ? Because I'm forced to picture apemen as plumbers and suburban
> crafts hobbyists.

hey, it's metaphor. get used to it.

do you object to other metaphorically derived technical terms?

> That's reason enough for it to be absent from the latest OED.
>
> Latterly, I've heard or read it applied (with what unconscious
> perfection! ) to whatever writing techniques are possessed by a
> student of freshman composition.

i've seen that. and a related use in the computer world.

arnold

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