A fellow editor passed this along to me:
I want to thank Adam Sharp for arranging these foreign words for whatchamacallit. I'm not quite sure it's accurate, though. I put huppeldepup in Google Translate and got hopping pup. Of course, the Dutch may have thought that a crazy puppy was a good visual representation of a weird object for which you have no name, something that gets lost when you need it. Or the whole thing could be nonsense. I put thingamajig in the translator and got dinges, which (when reversed) came out in English as thingy. Also, zamazingo I found nowhere in Turkish, but is a Xhosa word meaning round.
I don't care; I love huppeldepup and I'm adding it to my personal list.
We already have a lot of terms for these unknown thingies in English. Thesaurus.com gives me these words for whatchamacallit:
- doodad
- doohickey
- gizmo
- thingamabob
- widget
Under other terms I also found:
- gimcrack
- contraption
- dojigger
- jigger
- thingummy
- whatsis
- whatsit
- whosit
- whosis
- knickknack
- bric-a-brac
- flummery
We have a lot of words for nouns we don't remember in English. Not surprising, in one way; it's often considered the language with the most words, so there's that many more to forget.
In my family, whatchamacallit was my mom's favorite, but my dad preferred the simplicity of thing. As in, "Go to the bench and get me... one of those things -- you know, that thing." (No, we're not related to the Bidens.) He might add, "Aaah, what's it called." And 90% chance I would return with the wrong thing. I'd bring an airplane (Phillips) screwdriver when he wanted a 1/4-inch socket.
So I will try to remember huppeldepup and use it the next time I forget the noun for the object I actually need. The problem is, now I have to remember huppeldepup, when I ought to just remember what I'm looking for. Well, 90% I'll say naninani and not even know what I'm saying. And two more words will enter the English language.
I think my mother used "hoodeewhatzis", if I remember correctly.
ReplyDeleteOooh, good one, FM. It was Whoozewhatsis in our house. I haven't thought of that in years.
ReplyDelete