It’s a Thing

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Father Dominic calling from Chicago.

Father Dominic from Chicago. Well, welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

Thank you so much.

Well, I have a question about a phrase.

Well, I suppose a phrase, the way a word functions in a phrase.

My question is, when did thing become a thing?

I guess what I’m asking is, when did thing become sort of a category?

Somebody will say, you know, I saw this guy with purple pants on yesterday, and you’ll say, purple pants, is that even a thing?

Yes. Okay, good.

And I’ve tried to track this down, and I’ve had a lot of difficulty.

I can find a Seinfeld episode that’s the first sort of use of the phrase, but I’m wondering when the word thing began to reference not just sort of non-particular objects, but sort of whole categories themselves.

Well, I’ve used that. I’ve used it on the show, actually.

And I picked it up from a bunch of comedians that I follow on Twitter.

Most of them are in Los Angeles.

And for them, it’s one of the little rhetorical devices they use in this to call something into question.

So if somebody has some weird behavior, like you were saying, wearing odd clothing, you’re like, is that even a thing?

It’s just a nice way to call attention to an aberration or something quirky.

I’m not surprised that it might have been popularized by Seinfeld.

But I should tell you, if you looked in bigger dictionaries, you would find that a thing goes back quite a ways.

There’s some variations over time.

But, for example, we could talk about to make a thing out of something.

Like, so I get a scrape on the car and my wife gets upset.

And I’m like, are you going to make a thing out of this?

Because it’s just a scrape on the car, right?

And this goes back very far, actually, a couple hundred years.

There’s some nuance change over the centuries, but in general it’s talking about when you say a thing, you’re talking about a to-do.

Now, I have a question.

How do you think the article might affect it?

Because a thing seems to be different than the thing.

Right.

That’s a good question because we have the indefinite article and the definite article.

And when we use the indefinite article A, what we’re talking about is probably there’s a class of things that all kind of share the same characteristics.

When we talk about a thing, we’re talking about, oh, it goes with all these other things.

And usually in modern parlance, when we talk about a thing, we’re talking about style or we’re talking about a new way of behaving.

Comedians like to use a thing because there might be a new way to tell a joke.

Or you might say, oh, we’re not doing airplane food jokes anymore.

Now we’re doing Netflix jokes, right?

Just about, you know, my, I don’t know.

There’s just a whole, oh, is that a thing?

Are we doing that now?

Let’s all do this together.

We’re all going to make riffs on this joke.

And they’ll do it extensively and just riff on it until it’s dead, and then a new thing will come along.

But, you know, there’s some other things that have happened with thing as well.

The thing entry is a vast entry in most underbridge dictionaries.

You have talking about the thing to do, right?

Well, what do I mean by that?

Well, the thing to do, Martha, is to close your windows before you go through the car wash, right?

Yeah, but my thing is that if I close the windows.

Yeah, and then we have the other one.

We have the thing.

Well, the thing is.

Yeah, the thing of it is.

People say that when they’re explaining.

The thing is, and by that we mean the key point, the one thing that you should pay the most attention to.

And all of these uses of thing draw attention to the fact that we’re talking about an object that fits into a class of other objects or an event or an act that we should pay attention to, that deserve focus.

Got it.

Got it.

And I’m not surprised that the older generation didn’t get it.

But you know what?

I don’t think this is age-graded.

I think this is one of those things either you know the thing or you don’t know the thing.

You know a thing or you don’t know a thing.

Because there’s a long history of all these variations on the use of things, and it’s not that new.

It really isn’t.

And even the Seinfeld episode is probably 20 years old.

Right, right.

So I should just be grateful.

I know the thing.

Yeah, you know the thing.

Yeah, be grateful.

You know all about that, right?

By the time you’re in your 40s or 50s, you’ll no longer know the thing.

Grant and Martha, thank you so very much.

Our pleasure.

Thank you.

Best of luck to you.

Thanks for calling.

Yep.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

There are odd things about the English language.

We can help you untangle some of them.

Some we will just tangle more.

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