Etymology of Widget

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Arela Wright from Indianapolis, Indiana, and I was wondering what the word widget means.

Widget.

Widget, what it means?

Well, and how it came to be used in law school.

Are you in law school?

Yes, I am.

Aha. So tell us how it’s used there.

Actually, professors use it when they make hypothetical situations in class.

And actually, we just had one yesterday where there was a widget and a gadget.

Both were manufacturers, and they had a contract.

So that’s what you guys talk about, is widgets and gadgets?

And how to protect them.

And how to protect them.

Save our widgets.

It is a weird word, isn’t it?

Yeah, so this is a hypothetical product, right?

You don’t really specify what the gadget or what the widget does.

You don’t really talk about it.

It’s so that you just have a placeholder when you’re talking about the business of contracts and supply and vendors and that sort of thing, right?

Yeah.

When you talk about the law.

Yeah.

So that you can tell them apart quickly which manufacturer they may be preferencing.

Exactly right.

And so this widget use then is a kind of carryover from the more traditional widget use where widget is any old kind of hypothetical thing.

Or you use it for something that you don’t know the name of it.

But it tends to be used for an item, online or off,

Because there is now an online version of a widget,

Which will perform a vague, undefined task or has a vague, undefined purpose.

So are you saying that widget is legalese for whatchamacallit?

It’s kind of, yeah.

It kind of is for thingamajig or thingamabob.

Yeah, it’s kind of a version of that.

That’s very interesting.

Okay.

Well, that’s enough.

I like that.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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