Sun, Jan 09, 2005 page9

• Exploring the world of tongue-tippers with a whatchamacallit

  • By William Safire / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  On the Dow Jones OpinionJournal Web site, Claudia Rosett -- the modern Inspector Javert of Les Miserables on the oil-for-food trail of Jean Valjean -- reported on a news conference held by the UN secretary-general: "The contract that [Kofi] Annan referred to as `this Cotecna one,' as if he weren't quite sure what whichamahoosy everyone was talking about."

  Pressed to reveal her source of the unfamiliar word, Rosett would say only, "I borrowed it from an old family friend, who when she couldn't remember the name for something, would call it a whichamahoosy."

  I touched database with Google and can offer only one previous citation of that particular mouth-filler: a February 2002 use by a blogger who styles himself LoneRanger. It is related, I suspect, to hoosydingy, a word I have long used as a nonsense substitute when a specific term has slipped my mind. But even though I have tried all the variant spellings, I cannot find hoosydingy -- hoosiedinghy? -- in print anywhere. Closest use was by Kevin Paul Dupont in The Boston Globe early last year reporting about a hockey player's "receiving off-site physical therapy for his aching whatchamacallit or whodingy."

  We are now into the creative world of "tongue-tippers," terms used in place of words on the tip of the speaker's tongue but just beyond linguistic reach. When a reader of The Houston Chronicle expressed his curiosity about the words dojigger and thingy, the writer Leon Hale replied in an explosion of synonymy: "It's the same as a whatchamacallit or a thingumabob or a doomaflitchy or a how-you-call-it or a doodad or a hootis or a what's-it or a gizmo or a gadget or a widget or a doohicky."

  The Texas writer seemed put off by thingy. Perhaps that is because the etymology of its predecessor, thingumbob (now with a syllable added as thingumabob), was first reported by Francis Grose in his 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: "Mr. Thingumbob: a vulgar address or nomination to any person whose name is unknown, the same as Mr. What-d'ye-call'em." The courageous lexicographer Grose then gave the reason for the vulgarity: "Thingumbobs; testicles."

  Today, though thingy has one sense of "penis," as does thingamajig less frequently, most of the other terms are substitutes for a "small mechanical device whose name escapes the speaker."

  Gadget entered the written English language, according to the OED, in 1886 and outlasted its semantic competition: "Even the sailors forget at times," goes the citation from Robert Brown's "Spunyarn and Spindrift," "and if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken-fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom." The one that lasted was gadjet, with its spelling changed to gadget as the word entered Standard English. In the 1920s it spawned gimmick and in the 1940s gizmo.

  Gimmick, however, took on meanings beyond "a clever mechanical device." The reporter Jack Lait in 1930 captured its larcenous connotation, defining it as "any contrivance to make a fair transaction or contest unfair." In the phrase "You gotta have a gimmick," the sense is less deceptive: "an original marketing idea or selling proposition to attract customers."

  Another tongue-tipper that began in gadgetry in the 1920s and extended its meaning later in the century is hootenanny. The astronaut Walter Schirra used it in the mechanical sense in 1962: "Don't worry about it. That's just the hootenanny valve on the watchamacallit fluttering a little."

  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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