The secret history of the word 'tool'

Using tool as a slang term is not, however, a modern Princeton invention. Tool is a word with a long history. By the 1660s, a "tool" had come to mean a person who is easily manipulated. "Which made some take him as a tool, That knaves do work with, call'd a fool," wrote Samuel Butler in 1663. An 1849 text about the history of England describes sheriffs as "tools of the government." Across the pond, in a similar vein, when the Female Labor Reform Association at Massachusetts textile mills went on strike in 1845, its resolution described the chairman as "merely a corporation machine, or tool." Perhaps this usage relates to another slang definition of the word: For centuries, "tool" has been used to mean "penis." In "Henry VIII," Shakespeare describes a foreigner who comes to the court as someone "with the great Toole."

At Princeton, however, toolishness is generally gender-neutral. Liberals may deride Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) as a tool, whereas conservatives might describe Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) as such. Urbandictionary.com defines a tool as anyone "who claims to be a coffee fanatic but only buys Frappuccinos from Starbucks." Even certain academic disciplines, such as the Wilson School or finance program, are often said to contain the most tools. Perhaps those who insult these majors as being toolish, however, are forgetting that tools are historically the evolutionary signs of advanced intelligence. Tool diversity and expansion is positively correlated with brain growth. Maybe being associated with tools isn't such a bad thing after all. By putting themselves in an environment of tool users, the tools hope to learn the tricks of the trade and evolve into tool manipulators.

The noun form of "tool" is often used synonymously with "poser," a person who adopts traits of a certain group to give the illusion of belonging. There is, however, a subtle difference between the poser and the tool. For instance, rich kids from the suburbs who follow the pop-punk style of musicians like Avril Lavigne might be classified as posers in the sense that they slump the body into specific punk attitudes or tools in the sense that they are impressionable and want to be accepted by others. Etymologically, the poser is an actor who need not wholly believe the attitude he adopts and who is in control of his appearance, whereas the tool by definition is an object of manipulation. The poser can have his cake, but the tool must eat it, too.

Are we employing "tool" as creatively as we could be? Not that I am promoting slander (especially considering the current whirl of the JuicyCampus scandal) -but I wonder why we have not yet maximized our toolbox to its fullest. We have tool bags, certainly, implying that the person in question is not one mere tool but the embodiment of an entire collection of tools. But the Oxford English Dictionary gives many more permutations of the tool. Tool-coupling, the mechanical process in which the operating part of the tool is screwed onto the handle, would almost be too easy to adapt to, say, the couple majoring in Woody Woo with Finance certificates who, while interning for the same Wall Street I-banking firm, slurp their creme-based Frappucinos, don their double-popped collars and Nantucket Reds, and head for a liquid lunch at the club.

A tool-crib (defined as a storage site for mechanical tools) would naturally cradle the offspring of this pair. The tool-couple could drive its tool-car (a train car filled with equipment for clearing a railway after an accident) to their tool-house (a building where tools are kept) after a hard days tooling around.

Maybe this meditation on the tool is in itself a toolish endeavor - am I letting this slang get the better of me? Instead, I'd like to follow the advice of the well-known writer but rather unfortunately named Philip K. Dick: "If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." We should learn to manipulate the tool that is our language rather than letting it manipulate us.

Adrienne Raphel can be reached at araphel@princeton.edu.