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...
“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...
Blackacre, Whiteacre, and Greenacre are legal placeholder names for imaginary parcels of land, the real-estate cousins of doohickey and whatchamacallit. Lawyers and law students use them in hypotheticals about land transfers, taxes, and other...
A Hoosier says her friends tease her about the way she says doofitty when she can’t think of the right word for something. Grant and Martha discuss the long list of linguistic placeholders, including whatchamacallit, doodad, deely-bobber...
