Doomaflatchies

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Thomas McQueen. I’m in Arlington, Texas.

Hi, Thomas. Welcome to the program.

Hi. I was recently helping a co-worker fix a copy machine, and I was trying to describe a component in the paper tray that had to be slid into place. And I was trying to describe it, but another co-worker called it a dumaflatchee. And I’d never heard that before, and at first I thought she actually knew the name of the part, but then she explained it was basically like a thingamabob. And I never heard it. I looked it up and barely found any references for it. I was able to spell it pretty easy because it’s pretty straightforward. But I have no idea where it comes from. And I was just really wondering whether it was just some sort of gobbledygook word or if it was a word that actually had some sort of relation to something else. I figured it was probably local. I’m in Texas. But I just was really curious.

So you’re wondering if Dumaflachi is gobbledygook.

Yes.

Okay, and how are you spelling Dumaflachi?

I typed it out as D-O-O-M-A-F-L-A-T-C-H-Y. And I found it with I-E as slightly more common.

So you found the Tim McGraw song?

The what?

I think it’s Tim McGraw. Isn’t he the one who’s married to Faith Hill? How’s the song go?

Oh, no, I’ve never heard of it. Maybe your co-worker is a Tim McGraw fan. He has a song that goes something like, you flipped the switch on my dumaflatchee, played my piano like Liberace. You notice I’m not singing it, but that’s pretty sexy stuff.

So we’re just talking about kind of a placeholder word here, right? When you don’t know the real name of something, you might say dumaflatchee.

Right.

And that’s how she knew it. It sounded like she grew up with it.

Yeah, it’s part of that great tradition of placeholder words, as Grant was saying. Thinkamabob, doohickey, doo-wats. Yeah, I’m thinking that doohickey and doodad may be the predecessors of doomaflatchy, which sounds like a more intensified version of it, don’t you think? Doomaflatchy. There’s so many of them, and linguists have actually written long articles about them. There’s a long article in American Speech that mentions a whole bunch of these, like diddlyflop and diddleheimer and didn’twhacker and doob and doflop and dojiggy and dowhacker, and the list just goes on and on.

I see people make these up all the time, all kinds of variations, a huge number of spellings. Just any time they need a placeholder word, they come up with something kind of funny and throw it in there. But Dumaflatchy, that’s got some currency. People use it. It’s not that common. It doesn’t seem to have a regional component as far as I can tell.

No. It doesn’t look like it belongs to one part of the country.

Right. I bet that Tim McGraw song has something to do with anybody knowing it.

Yeah.

Could be. Interesting. Yeah, so ask her if she’s a fan. Somewhere there’s a songwriter with a thesaurus who’s really happy right now.

That’s great. So I guess the answer is maybe from Doohickey or Doodad, and just an elaborated version of that.

Thank you, Martha.

Well, thanks so much for calling.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Bye, Tom.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know what? I bet if we put out the call, we could get lots more examples of this.

Oh, yeah, sure. What do you call a thing when you don’t know its name, or what do you call a person when you don’t know their name? 877-929-9673, or send your answers and email to words@waywordradio.org.