Terms for college grades, 1958; was: "smash-mouth" + Univ. of Wisconsin student slang (1965)

[Victor Steinbok]

My experience is obviously considerably later (1983++), but "tooling"
and "tool" as a verb, in general, have retained their meaning. However,
references to a person as a "tool" are quite different. References to
MIT are nearly interchangeable "Tech" and "Tute". MIT grads/students
(more grads than students) are "techies" (difficult to distinguish from
other techies, except by "insider" context). A "tool" means the same
thing at MIT that it does on any other campus when someone says, "He's
such a tool!" In fact, one of the inside jokes in our little group
involved the contrast in meaning between the verb and the noun. Perhaps
things have devolved even further since I stopped frequenting the campus
(3-4 times a years, these days).

     VS-)

On 1/29/2011 10:32 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
> I've always liked M.I.T.'s "Tech tool" (wherein "Tech" is capitalized
> because _Tech(nology)_ is - or was, at least through the '70's - the
> undergrad-insider equivalent of the outsider "M.I.T.") in that meaning
> and _tooling_ for "hitting the books."
>
> --
> -Wilson

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