Nobody listens to a word I say here, either.  Some things never change.

I did read what you wrote, but I added my take on the other use of the ge- prefix, which, I feel, differed from yours. I’m sorry if I offended you. Please accept my apology.

I listen, Eliza, I listen so hard I can’t help myself sometimes. Which may not make you feel any better. And that was a very helpful and informative post, jheem.

There is another use of the “ge-” prefix I dredged up out of the past. The family I stayed with had a 3 year old boy to whom “god verdomme!” was not entirely a strange expression. Only he reduced it to “gedomme!” Everybody thought it was pretty cute.

Please, please, all you good folks.  Take my comments as you would a bag of chips - with a pinch of salt.  And vinegar.  And a dash of sauce, if necessary.  And when you’ve had enough of them (because they’re not doing your health any good), you can always bin them.

Okay, all volatile gasses are gone now? So maybe I can light a candle and try to shed some light on this (or obscure it even more).

Jheem is of course right. The ge- prefix can be combined with nouns and I was not thinking along those lines and I should have.

As far as Dutch is concerned, linguists don’t talk about different prefixes, but distinguish different uses of the same prefix. The WNT distinguishes five different categories (with many sub-categories). But if you say that’s nit-picking, I’m not offended.

Point is (I think) that Foolscap proposed a Dutch word ‘geboedel’ as origin for ‘caboodle’. I like that idea and his reasoning very much because the step from geboedel > caboodle is smaller than from boedel > caboodle. My concern was and is that I can find no proof of that ‘geboedel’ ever existed. Moreover, all the online sources mention ‘boedel’ as the source.

The entry in the WNT mentions under ge- as category 1bβ that words formed with this prefix can indicate:

Collections of different objects, such as geboomte, gebeente* ,...

*from ‘boom’ (tree) and ‘been’ (bone) respectively.

I think that one comes closest to what our ‘geboedel’ would be, even though (as confirmed by Van Dale) such words are usually formed by adding a suffix -t(e). In that case you might even expect ‘geboedelte’. But that assumption is not getting us any closer to an answer.

Point is (I think) that Foolscap proposed a Dutch word ‘geboedel’ as origin for ‘caboodle’. I like that idea and his reasoning very much because the step from geboedel > caboodle is smaller than from boedel > caboodle.

This might be a good time to re-recommend that people read (or recommend that people re-read) the entry in Dave’s Big List, which points out that the original form of the word (in English) was “boodle” (derived from Dutch boedel according to Dave; the OED seems less confident on this point).  The addition of the “ca-” or “ka-” thus took place in English, unless there was a second borrowing.  The OED suggests that the extra initial syllable might be a slurring of “kit and”, making “kit and caboodle” a double redundancy.

I hope you’re not suggesting I didn’t read it. I said ‘all the on-line sources’. Maybe I should have added ‘that I checked’ and that includes the Big List.

I didn’t (and don’t) see the significance of the similar sound of a (hypothetical) geboedel to “caboodle” if we know that the original English form was not “caboodle” but “boodle”.  The level of significance that you (and foolscap) seemed to be attaching to the similarity in sound made me wonder if you’d both forgotten that “caboodle” was not the orignal English form.

I’m just imagining that the Pennsylvania Dutch Mafia got a hold of the thing… There’s no evidence that they didn’t.

Wisconsin was also the location of a lot of German and Dutch immigrants. The big list does not specifically state that the second “k” sound was merely an echo of the “k” in “kit”, but phrases with a repetition of sounds or a redundancy of meaning tend to have appeal and duration in the English language (we seem to respond to jingoisms). OTOH, there’s no evidence either way as to how the phrase became altered, and this is an alternative, albeit hypothetical, explanation.

“Tit for tat” from “dit voor dat” is an example of an English corruption of a Dutch expression. I agree it’s all speculation, though.

(we seem to respond to jingoisms)

Let’s leave politics out of it.

Perhaps you mean “jingles”?

BTW, neither the OED nor AHD support a Dutch origin of “tit for tat”.  I assume you have evidence?

Migod! Two slips in a single post. I’d call that evidence that working at a real job destroys the mind, as one day of it has clearly done to me.