Meantime, musicians were applying the word to informal concerts of folk music. "Hootenanny," wrote Britain's Daily Mail in 1963, "is to the folk singer what a jam session is to the jazzman."
British English also has its words for the unremembered objects. In 1962, The Sunday Times explained that "`ujah'... was used as widely and as indiscriminately as `gimmick' and `gadget' are used now." It was usually spelled oojah and was thought to be of Hindustani origin. The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang has its updated version: oojamaflip.
Doo is a sound that begins several substitutes for words unknown or forgotten. The Dictionary of American Regional English has doodinkus, meaning "contrivance." Doojigger, with which The Houston Chronicle reader triggered the writer Hale's above list of tongue-tippers, was born in the Roaring Twenties and appeared in a 1938 novel by Manfred Lee and Frederic Dannay. Their smooth detective Ellery Queen told a dull-witted lawman: "Since you don't ascribe any significance to these doojiggers, surely you won't mind if I appropriate them?" Doohickey appeared in US naval slang in 1914: "We were compelled to christen articles beyond our ken with such names as `do-hickeys,' `gadgets' and `gilguys.'" And doodad appeared in Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street" in 1920, meaning "fancy ornament."
The widespread use of tongue-tippers -- especially whatchamacallit, a squeezing of "what you may call it" -- has been effectively satirized. NBC's Jay Leno noted last January that in the previous year's State of the Union address: "Bush said there was no doubt Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Last night, Bush said they had `weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activity.' What's he going to say next year? `Iraq had weaponishy thingamajig whatchamacallits.'"
Applied to people, the leading tongue-tipper was for years whosit (or whoozis, as in the 1971 Stephen Sondheim lyric for I'm Still Here), then, more dismissively, whatsisname. In speculation about who will become the new intelligence czar, The Wall Street Journal referred to the title as National Intelligence Director, as does the legislation, dubbing the new chief the NID and his minions nidniks (a neat play on the Yiddish nudnik, "monumental nag"). The Washington Post, however, calls the same job Director of National Intelligence, or DNI, analogous to DCI, Director of Central Intelligence. This caused The National Journal's Hotline to ask, "So, Who Gets to Be the Whatchamacallit?"
I know the answer to that. The name will come to me in a minute. It's...he's...Whatsisface!
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