Unlike “chicken-fixing,” “timmey-noggy,” or “wim-wom,” however, the “gadjet” was destined for greater things. The Oxford English Dictionary claims anecdotal evidence for the term’s use by the 1850s as a word for an object whose name one cannot remember, a use consistent with its first print appearance in Robert Brown’s 1886 book Spunyarn and Spindrift, a Sailor Boy’s Log of a Voyage Out and Home in a China Tea-Clipper, which reports: “Then the names of all the other things on board a ship! I don’t know half of them yet even the sailors forget at times, and if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken-fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom-just pro-tem., you know” (quoted in Quinion 2007). The story that it was derived from Gaget, Gauthier and Cie’s name stamp on tourist copies of the Statue of Liberty, is now discredited, and sources suggest instead an etymological origin in the French gâchette, the “catch-piece of a mechanism” (a term applied, for example, to parts of a firing mechanism), or gagée, meaning a small tool or instrument. Appropriately for an object whose boundaries and definition are vague and whose forms and functions are varied, even the origins of the word are unclear. The gadget is the emblem of post-industrial society.įrom the beginning the gadget has been surrounded by an air of uncertainty, a slipperiness in our understanding that has benefited it in its slow rise to prominence. The machine was the emblem of industrial society.
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