A word used, especially in spoken English, when the name of an object has been forgotten.
Synonymes:
thingy - informal
whatchamacallit - informal (I like this one too)
(borrowed w/o courtesy of the Cambridge Dictionary)
P.S.: add a +1 in the comments if you too are sometimes positively baffled by the smorgasbord of doohickeys the human language can come up with :-p
5 comments:
Love those words.
But, but, I use all of those words quite often.
As a mostly French speaking Canadian from Montreal, I'm not aware of all those rare words in English.
But to tell you, in French we have such special words too. The difference between the French of France and the French from here, Province of Quebec makes it hard for the France people to understand us.
Imagine they have to substitle our movies made in Quebec so they can understand the topic.
I think the English language is an embarrassment of riches... oh, hell... it's simply an embarrassment. The nice thing is... if you say something incorrectly long enough, eventually it'll make it into Webster's Dictionary!
@Rick: I'm sure you do. But to me, learning English is a never-ending process that will never reach the level of my native French, unfortunately.
@JiEL: oh believe me I know. Being French I once watched a French-Canadian comedy in its original version some years ago... I found it even more hilarious although I didn't catch half of it :-)
But since then I know that it would feel really weird if I were to say in front of a French-speaking Canadian something like "il faut que j'emmène mes gosses à l'école"... :-p
@Upton: LoL! Well then, I hope I do not sound too snob with my (kind of) scholar English. But you're right, to me English is a more living language than French. I think it's due to both academic reasons (when and how they were set by strict rules) as well as a different approach and tolerance towards new words, even if these only last a single generation time.
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