Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, linguist, teacher, slacker. This week, we're checking our kit.
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Here's a fun fact: the Oxford English Dictionary has a whopping 13 definitions for kit, only two of which are verbs. So let's have some fun. I've listed five noun-definitions below. Which one did I make up?
A small fiddle, formerly much used by dancing masters.
A school of pigeons.
A circular wooden vessel, made of hooped staves.
A hollow divot made in wood to allow a hinge to be recessed.
A composition of resin, pitch, and tallow applied to the canvas used for covering carcasses.
Ready for the answer? I made up entry number 4. All the others are legitimate uses of the word kit. Of course, in modern English the most common definitions might be "a collection of personal effects or necessaries, esp. as packed up for traveling" or "the outfit of tools required by a workman." (Which, interestingly enough, are sub-definitions of the third definition listed above. That usage was eventually transferred to the small box full of gear that soldiers needed to carry, which was then transferred to small containers of gear and so on.)
Now, the reason this is on my mind today is because I've been doing some shopping. Like just about everyone else on the planet, getting my hair cut during the pandemic has been somewhat low on the priority list. I finally got tired of my hair getting in my face and opted to just order a pair of hair-clippers and be done with it. The last time I bought hair clippers was in 1998. I had just graduated from college and a pair of hair clippers was cheaper and easier than twice-monthly trips to the barbershop. I got the best clippers I could afford, but there was little more in the box than the clippers and some plastic length setters.
Fast forward to today. A quick look around the internet gave me a dozen different hair-cutting kits. The one I eventually chose has not just the clippers, and not just the plastic length-setters, but a comb, scissors, and a barber's bib all wrapped up in a nice little travel bag. Oooh. Aaah. I found this interesting but not surprising. After all, kits have been a convenient way for retailers to bind disparate but related goods together since at least the 1850s. (In the OED entries, definition 2d, "a set or outfit of tools, equipment," dates back to 1859 although, it should be noted, the defining usage is from a dictionary detailing burglar street slang.)
By the time the 20th century rolled around, it was common to see the word in use to sell everything from military tailoring services to car maintenance products to plastic model sets. And so on and so forth until, as mentioned, you can buy kits for just about everything from first aid to woodworking to, well, hair cutting.
All of this has brought to mind two questions:
Does this retail phenomenon of everything being a kit extend to independent or artisanal sellers? My suspicion is that as mass-produced goods become ever easier to source and combine into discrete packages, kits have become the domain of Amazon and Rakuten. I'm guessing that Etsy and eBay sellers do not have as much room in their stock and / or pricing for selling kits and instead must rely on individual items. Now, one caveat here is that I'm assuming that this disparity (if it exists) is caused by the market and not by deliberate decision. In other words, I'm assuming that an Etsy seller who sells soap is not selling a soap making kit because it's too expensive to source and market, not because they purposely decided not to sell that kind of product. I don't have any answers here, it's just something I'm curious about.
The second question is much easier to answer: what definition of kit is returned when you do an image search? Words like kit make an interesting way of testing image search algorithms. As Google, Facebook, and Amazon (and their subsidiary products like YouTube, Instagram, and Goodreads, respectively) track our browsing and shopping histories, their algorithms try to present you with products or ideas you might be interested in. When it works right, you end up finding something new that you might like. When it doesn't, well, it's just creepy as hell. So, as a way of testing what the big tech companies think you're into, go to any of the sites I mentioned and type in "kit" (with the quotations). When I use Google, I get first aid kits. When I use Unsplash, I get baby foxes. I have no idea what that says about me, but it's interesting data to have, isn't it?
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New issue of The Glossary on Friday. Until then, stay safe, stay sane. Learn something.
Joel
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