CROSSING THE LANGAUGE BARRIER-THING'S A DANGEROUS TRIP

There was a time when I was fairly articulate. I used words like "ethnocentric" and "mellifluous" and "incisive" without the slightest hesitation.

I had no idea what I was talking about, but I said it extremely well.

Somewhere along the line, my spoken vocabulary did a bunker. It escaped, disappeared, flew the coop.

I think it got sucked out the hole in the ozone layer, along with my 20s.

I have stopped using real words. I now talk about items in terms of "thingies," referring to the remote control as "the television-turner-on-thingy."

You know what I mean.

Perhaps watching so many candidates posture for votes has caused my sudden loss of language. They all talk for weeks without actually saying anything.

As the election gets closer, candidates of all stars and stripes will start using "thingy"-type words more and more as they speak in terms of budgets and visions and plans for rebuilding (rediscovering, revitalizing, you pick the gerund-thingy) America.

But, as a friend of mine observed, "You can't blame everything on the election, darn it all." I don't think my health insurance will pay for rhetoric-induced aphasia.

Maybe there are just more thingies out there for me to gesture and stammer at.

Last week, I did a story about people jumping a fence at a local intersection, rather than walking to the intersection and pushing the little button on the stop light to receive a "walk" signal so they could safely cross the road.

I described said traffic safety device (to co-workers, not in print) as, "you know, the push-button cross-walk thingy."

Since I didn't know what the device was actually called and couldn't reach a traffic engineer, I wrote around it.

That's a time-honored journalistic technique, by the way, and will soon be added to the categories for Pulitzer prizes. Competition will be fierce.

Engineers don't seem to respond well when people refer to highly technical, user friendly devices (designed, built and installed by engineers, incidentally) as "thingies."

They want thingies called by their proper (multi syllabic, highly technical and probably copyrighted) names.

The exception is Mr. Scott on "Star Trek," who alternately referred to his warp engines as "beasties" or "bairns," depending on how well they were utilizing those dilithium thingies.

Like "aloha" and "attractive," thingy is a highly versatile word. It can mean anything you want it to in any context whatsoever.

Think about your last blind date. "He (or she) has a very attractive personality."

What, exactly does that mean? They breathe through their nose? They use silverware? Their parole officer really likes them?

Now try this sentence. "Honey, please move that thingy on the table to the kitchen counter."

Pick a noun, any noun.

As a species, humans share the trait of loving to name things. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden got to name all the animals. We invent things all the time and name them and spend lots of money to make sure no one steals those names.

And over the centuries, we've invented lots of words to cover those names we can't remember.

Thingies, whosits, whatsits, whatchamacallits, you-knows, gizmos, doohickeys.

A gizmo by any other name...

Never mind.

~Peggy O'Farrell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.