An Outfit with Four Wheels and a V8

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, is this Martha?

This is Martha. Who’s this?

This is Jack Cook. Well, I’m Jack Cook.

I’m from far western North Dakota in Sentinel Butte,

Which is about 10 miles from Montana.

Well, cool. What’s on your mind today?

Well, I’ve used a word around here,

And other people use this word that means a lot of different things.

The word itself is outfit.

And, for example, my granddaughter just graduated high school and went to work at a hotel down the road.

And her dad helped her get a new outfit, which is a new car.

And she wanted a car for the winter to drive through the snow and all that kind of thing.

But an outfit could be, I guess, new clothes she needs for work.

But around here, everybody says, well, you got a new pickup or you got a new outfit.

So the outfit could be car or tractor or clothes or maybe clothes for Halloween, a new outfit.

So I was just wondering if you’ve heard that from a lot of places,

Or is it up here in Montana, North Dakota?

Yeah, when you said she was shopping for a new outfit,

I was picturing her going in and out of dressing rooms and putting clothes back on the rack and trying to decide.

That’s the way I thought, but no.

Around here, everybody says they’re getting a new outfit, but it could be anything.

How about that?

Yeah, this is an interesting one.

It’s very much a Western word from where you are through the mountain states.

You’re going to find this in that part of North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Utah,

Maybe other nearby states, although I don’t have evidence for that.

It’s a natural outgrowth of that word outfit that refers to a group of people working or hunting or traveling or herding or exploring together.

It’s firmly in Americanism.

It comes from working in the West.

I’ve heard of an outfitter that takes people on hunting trips.

He’s an outfitter.

There we go.

You’re plugging right into the story of this word.

Because what that outfitter does is they equip all of those people, right?

They equip them with gear.

And they may equip them with transportation.

And so the noun outfit comes from the outfitting you might do originally, very originally, to a ship or regiment or an expedition.

So outfitting was equipping the group with the equipment.

And then that word outfit became the group.

That word changed.

It became the group that used and carried the equipment rather than the equipment itself.

And then, in the case of some of the Western states, outfit became the vehicle that carries the equipment and personnel.

So this is what we call transference, where the word is borrowed again and again to slightly modify.

So outfit goes from being the verb of what you do to being the group that does something with some things to being the things themselves.

And in this case, it’s the thing that carries the equipment and the people.

So it’s really a natural progression.

You think about it over a couple hundred years.

And so when we talk about, oh, so-and-so runs an outfit over there.

They got about 1,000 head of cattle.

That’s related as well because it’s talking about, we’re not talking about just him alone,

But we’re talking about his team of people, his equipment, his land, the whole operation.

And so that’s kind of an earlier form of that word outfit.

So it’s all related.

There probably was a time in there, and I have not been able to track it down,

Where outfit before automobiles would refer to somebody’s wagon or whatever kind of wheels he had pulled by horses.

I love that this word outfit is connected to several hundred years of history of the growth and settlement of that part of the country.

That’s good to know.

Yeah.

And it’s funny how people use it.

Different parts of the country use it a different way.

That’s right.

We may be one people, but we speak more than one English.

Yes, very true.

Good.

All right, Jack, take care.

Thank you for your call.

Yeah, thanks a lot.

All right, be well.

Bye, Jack.

Okay.

See you.

Thanks.

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