Monica in Burlington, Vermont, understood right away when a friend said her day got kerfunkulated. Words such as thingamajiggy, doohickey, whatchamacallit, and dumaflache work as placeholders, filling a gap when speakers do not need, or do not want...
Nikki in Northampton, Massachusetts, wonders about a term her dad used for someone who’s a little odd or weird: do funny. As far back as the 1850s, Do funny or Doo funny was an amusing last name for characters in satire, whether in newspapers...
Jase in Austin, Texas, knows that hickey means a “love bite” or “mark left on the skin,” and doo-hickey refers to a small object that the speaker can’t recall the name of, but why would anyone refer to a hickey in the...
“Ix-nay on the ocolate-chay in the upboard-cay” is how you’d say “nix on the chocolate in the cupboard” in pig Latin. English speakers have a long history of inserting syllables or rearranging syllables in a word to...
A hootenanny, commonly thought of as a party in Appalachia, is also a term for German pancakes. But when you look in the Dictionary of American Regional English, you’ll notice that hootenanny is synonymous with doohickey or thingamajig, and...
What’s a doomaflatchie? A listener shares this alternate for doohickie, thingamajig, doodad, or any other one of those whatchamacalits. Here’s the Tim McGraw song about his doomaflatchie. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
