That whatchamicallit (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

That whatchamicallit
Tags: Colloquial Language \| Idiom
Share with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon
Language Learning Forum : General discussion

31 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4 Next >>

Leurre
Bilingual Pentaglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5425 days ago
219 posts - 372 votes

Speaks: French*, English*, Korean, Haitian Creole, Spanish^C2
Studies: Japanese

Message 9 of 31

13 August 2012 at 11:40pm | IP Logged

In Korean 전라도 dialect there's 거시기. Though its not super used nowadays.

Truc and machin were mentioned for french, but there's also just 'chose'.

Also where I lived we mashed all three together and said " tu peux me passer le... le
trucmachinchose la steup?" (in that order).

We would also say 'truc facon chose' mashed together, or sometimes just 'facon chose'

Not sure to what extent this is valid in other areas though.
2 persons have voted this message useful

dampingwire
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4665 days ago
1185 posts - 1513 votes

Speaks: English*, Italian*, French
Studies: Japanese

Message 10 of 31

13 August 2012 at 11:54pm | IP Logged

In Italian you can use "aggeggio" or maybe "coso".
1 person has voted this message useful

IronFist
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6437 days ago
663 posts - 941 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Korean

Message 11 of 31

14 August 2012 at 12:50am | IP Logged

montmorency wrote:

And for people:

Whatshisname | whatshername | wossisname | wossername | wossname

There's also whats-his-bucket and what's-her-bucket when you can't remember someone's name.

No idea what the origin of those are.
1 person has voted this message useful

MixedUpCody
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5256 days ago
144 posts - 280 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, Mandarin

Message 12 of 31

14 August 2012 at 3:26am | IP Logged

In Hawaiian English they say da kine. As in, gimme da kine boy.
1 person has voted this message useful

Josquin
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4844 days ago
2266 posts - 3992 votes

Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish
Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian

Message 13 of 31

14 August 2012 at 1:42pm | IP Logged

IronFist wrote:

There's also whats-his-bucket and what's-her-bucket when you can't remember someone's name.

I've also heard whats-his-face in these circumstances. Sounds kind of funny. :)

@Cristina: Cool that German and Norwegian share such important basic vocabulary! That should make learning Norwegian a piece of cake! ;)
1 person has voted this message useful

vermillon
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4678 days ago
602 posts - 1042 votes

Speaks: French*, English^C2, Mandarin
Studies: Japanese, German

Message 14 of 31

14 August 2012 at 3:11pm | IP Logged

emk wrote:

In French:

C'est quoi, ce truc ?
Il y avait un petit machin pour ça, mais je ne peux pas le trouver.
J'ai parlé hier soir avec Monsieur… Monsieur Machin.

Native speaker corrections welcome. :-)

Truc, machin and also bidule can indeed be place holders for objects and names.
As a bonus, you can say together "machin bidule chouette" : chouette cannot be used alone as opposed to the other two, but always come after "machin, bidule".
The first three can also be combined as "machin truc" and "truc bidule"... there's no restriction but these two are the most common.
You can also get "truc muche" (perhaps spelt without space).

2 persons have voted this message useful

sans-serif
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Finland
Joined 4559 days ago
298 posts - 470 votes

Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish
Studies: Danish

Message 15 of 31

22 August 2012 at 11:44am | IP Logged

Ellsworth wrote:

In Finnish, I have read the word "vekotin" to mean something like that.

I could imagine using words like vekotin, vempele, vehje, härveli, härpäke or even systeemi refer to a tool, a piece of electronics or a machine of some sort. For more mundane things it's probably more common to say juttu.

Those are the ones I can up with right now, though I'm sure there are many more than I've used myself at one time or another, and many many more that I've never even heard of.
3 persons have voted this message useful

Mooby
Senior Member
Scotland
Joined 6105 days ago
707 posts - 1220 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Polish

Message 16 of 31

22 August 2012 at 12:57pm | IP Logged

Another variant of thingymijig is thingmebob, used quite a lot in Britain.

1 person has voted this message useful

This discussion contains 31 messages over 4 pages: << Prev 1 2 3 4 Next >>

Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum

This page was generated in 0.3438 seconds.