What's
a Doohickey?
Sometimes, Americans have little
mental pauses,
where something’s right on the tip of our tongue, but we can’t think of
the
exact word—or when we want to euphemise unseemly speech. Fortunately,
there’s
a way around this that doesn’t involve brain surgery or duct tape. We
use
substitution words that can mean anything and everything.
Here’s
an ode to
mental vacuity.
Substitution
Words
I was rooting willy-nilly through a buncha stuff, looking every
whichway
for the dinky little whatchamacallit to fix the goldong thingamajig,
but
good ol’ whatsizname had put it in the hooziwhatsit, as usual! Boy oh
boy, what a load
of hooey. Always the same old rigamarole with that cockamamie bozo.
He’s such a pipsqueak!
If I found it, ka-ching, I’d be rich, which would be just jim dandy!
I'd be totally discombobulated. You-know-who had done you-know-what
with the goofy little gadget again, so whaddyaknow ... there was
something-or-other
wrong with it. What a snafu! I had a heck of a time getting ahold of
whatsername
to come over and take care of it with her special little doohickey that
she
keeps there in the thingamabob. For the gazillionth time, the flightly
little flibbertigibbit
said alrighty, she wouldn't shilly shally, she’d schlep over with her
widget fixer and whatnot
to do a bodaciously whizbang job on the whole shebang. That's right,
the whole kit 'n caboodle, no ifs, ands, or buts about it ... no
malarkey. Okee dokey, but she was a skosh
busy right then, yada, yada, yada. Yessirreebob, we usually have
gadgets
galore, but what with the this-and-that, and all the hooplah, it’s all
topsy turvy today, ’cuz
that humungous nincompoop is still in the whatsit acting like
everything's just hunky dory. That's just a bunch gobbledeegook. Pure
gibberish. He's such an old rapscallion. Jeeminy Christmas, the
shenanigans of that old fogey. Yackety schmackety, blah,
blah, blah! Shucks, I wanted to find it on my own, and not be penalized
for
it—I’m just so darned tired of gimme’s and gotcha’s by a lotta has-been
nosybones
out hobnobbing with hoity toity wannabes. The real nitty gritty is
that, young and old, they’re just a buncha
happy-go-lucky whippersnappers and cantankerous old fuddyduddies who
don’t know diddly. I poked among the
gewgaws, tchotchkes, gimcracks, and knickknacks, there in the doodad,
but
I found zilch, zero, zippo, nil, nada and null. So-and-so told me
such-and-such
about the deeleebob, but I just don’t know where that little gizmo is.
Sheesh!
It’s a big whoopdedoo when you can’t even remember where the gosh
diddly
darned whaddyacallit is!