Any of a variety of speech patterns used to indicate that a character, while intelligent, is perhaps too young, too inexperienced and/or insufficiently educated (or simply talks too fast) to properly express the complex ideas and thoughts that they clearly possess.
One of the most obvious elements is a lack of relevant vocabulary, leading to both unconventional adjectival-noun structures like "shooty-gun thing", and incomplete, floundering similes that turn back on themselves in frustration: "That idea went over like... like... like a thing that doesn't go over very well." Metaphorgotten is frequently a side effect. Often includes Oh God, with the Verbing! or similar. And sometimes Name McAdjective is employed.
The Giver of Lame Names is often a serious offender. This trope, for example, would probably be called Dialogue-Where-The-Speaker's-Intent-Exceeds-Their-Powers-Of-Vocabulary-For-Comedic-Effect, if left up to him.
When properly handled, Buffy Speak can give the sense of a teenaged group's special jargon or argot without necessarily imitating anything actually found in the real world (Which is part of his purpose in general. Slang language, especially for the younger set, tends to change at warp speed. Buffy speak allows a level of timelessness that help avoid Totally Radical tropes.) Improperly handled, it can sound ludicrously fake and may damage Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
Named for the distinctive speech patterns of the teenage characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show's creator, Joss Whedon, is often credited with "creating" this form of writing (also called Whedonspeak), though in reality it existed long before Buffy.
Contrast with Totally Radical. Compare Person as Verb. See also Shaped Like Itself and Department of Redundancy Department. Contrast Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness.
Examples:
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Japanese Cartoony Things (Anime)
In the YuYu Hakusho dub, on the way to Sensui's hideout, Yuusuke ask Kurama what the seeds he's spreading around are for, and our favourite red-haired Bishōnen goes into an explanation about lighting their way, trailing off into phosphorus and bread crumbs. In that case, it sounded more like Kurama (who is a Really 700 Years OldChessmaster and former White Haired Pretty) was trying to Buffy-Speak so that Yusuke would understand him.
It's likely that the bread crumbs are a reference to "Hansel and Gretel", who leave a trail of bread crumbs through the forest that they can follow back, though it gets eaten by birds.
From the Excel Saga dub: "I have built this wooden underling-like puppet with an optional soy sauce puffy thingy!"
In Fate/Zero, Rider calls stealth bombers 'big black B-2 thingies,' and he describes the Gate of Babylon as 'showing off with a lot of shiny-goldy things.'
Ali Al-Saachez from Mobile Suit Gundam 00 uses this trope to refer to his enemies, "Celestial-Whatchamacallit!". Not like "Being" is a hard word to say or remember, but try telling that to his face.
Blue Beetle: And you stink of... evil stink? Evilosity? Banter. Sucks. So much.
The sort-of pixie-like Preservers in ElfQuest apparently can't help but replace even simple words with ones smashed together from others. The silk they spit is "wrapstuff", elves are "highthings", humans are "bigthings", someone who's sleeping is "stillquiet"... This extends to the names of anyone who's not a Preserver, e.g. Dewshine, a blonde elf, becomes "Sunnygold Highthing" (despite the name being not that different from Preserver-names like "Petalwing" or "Berrybuzz"). Often they don't even use those names consistently, but make up a new one every time they refer to the same character. Preservers are also Third Person Persons. In short, they sound extremely ditzy.
Mainly from Empowered in the Meta breaks — and occasionally in the main story as well.
The Scott Pilgrim series is chock-full of Buffy Speak. "There's a thingy over there." "A thingy?" "A door.", "You're not going to the thing"?, "Scott, look out! It's that guy!", etc.
King Superman: Both the characters and author seem to use these from time to time, particularly the word 'scorpony'.
At one moment in the Mass Effect RP, "The Council Era", krogan Overlord Tikrog Kurvok makes use of buffy speak when referring to coffee, saying, "Give me a stimulant drink, to go. With extra energizer thingies." Kurvok repeatedly uses Buffy Speak throughout the storyline.
In the fanfic "Princess", Julien describes female lemurs as having a "thing that looks like a... thing". According to Word Of God, there are very few ways that are both in-character and PG-rated to describe an enlarged clitoris. He goes on to say that they "don't have the... other things, and they do have the... girl things".
The four are occasionally prone to this in With Strings Attached, either because of vocabulary failure, deliberate humor, or simple laziness.
In a Shout Out to Help!, Ringo calls the Vasyn “the thingy.” (George calls it “the Big Pink Job,” hence the subtitle.)
In the fic Presidential Initiation, America tries to explain who he is to the president... and does a really bad job of it as he says things like "I'm a national aromatherapy persecution or whatever the hell it's called!" Also used is the term "people/nation thingies."
The Doctors Doctor has the Thirteenth Doctor rather wryly resorting to Buffy Speak to explain something to John, which also constitutes as a Call Back:
The Little Mermaid has most of the song "Part of Your World" based on this when Ariel sings about her collection of land... gizmos, gadgets, whoosits, whatzits, and thingamabobs. She apparently improves her vocabulary as the song progresses, though.
Previous to becoming a human, most of what Ariel knew about human things came from what Scuttle told her. This led to things like trying to blow bubbles out of a pipe and combing her hair with a fork when she was with Eric.
Madagascar has an I Resemble That Remark example: "No, no, no… you don't talk now, okay? You're not so good with the putting the words together and their coming out good thing."
Also, Julien. "After much deep and profound brain things inside my head ..."
In the 2007TMNT movie, Raphael says "The thing about you immortal stone guys is... you know you're immortal... and made of stone. I sound like Mikey!"
Kuzco in The Emperor's New Groove: "What is he babbling about? He's like the thing that wouldn't shut up!"
The Moving Pictures On The Big Silver Screen Thing In The Flesh (Live Action Films)
Valentine from Mirror Mask: "I will slip unnoticeable through the darkness like a dark, unnoticeable slippy thing." A notable example in that he doesn't hesitate at any point in the sentence. That's what he meant to say.
"We will do what rich people do! We will bathe in... fish! Eat our weight in... chocolate buttons! Learn to play the concertina!"
A Cinderella Story has this as Brianna makes Sam write her papers for her.
Brianna: Can you make it sound more like ME this time?, I'm so sick and tired of having to explain why I sound so smart on paper and so... not smart... not on paper
In Bad Boys II Det. Marcus Burnett is accidentally high on ecstasy when he and his partner go to ask their captain for a warrant. He is so out of it that his partner tries to send him on a fool's errand - call another detective and tell him... something...
Mike Lowrey: Tell Vargas... tell him... that thing we said to tell him...
The titular character of Juno has a most idiosyncratic syntax. "Prom is for weenises."
In Help!, George Harrison realizes that the curling stone he just threw is actually a bomb, and exclaims, "Hey, it's a thingy! A fiendish thingy!"
Ace: I will be as a fly on the wall. A grain of salt in the ocean. I shall slip amongst them like a transparent... thing.
Characters in Burn After Reading do this constantly, especially Linda and Chad as they attempt to act like real spies. Some of the best moments are sentences of Chad's that he loses control of ("Looks can be... deceptive"), sometimes resorting to his go-to word ("I thought you might be worried... about the security... of your shit.")
Mayor: These folks are making us look like a bunch of... Oh, the ones who are very funny, kings have them... Send in my... Fool! They're making us look like a bunch of fools!
And he does something similar to this several times over the course of the movie.
In Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter says to Alice, "You used to be much more... muchier. You've lost your muchness."
Which is a reference to the book, where the Dormouse asks if Alice has ever seen a drawing of a muchness.
Boogie Nights. "Gimme one of those sprinkly Christmas things".
In The Wizard of Oz, the Wizard stumbles over the word "philanthropists", eventually calling them "good-deed doers".
A character in Hackers tells another that the MacGuffin has been put "in that place where I put that thing that time".
Subverted because it was intentionally done by an intelligent character to sound vague. He was in jail at the time accused of federal hacking breaches, telling his friend where the evidence is over the phone.
In Mr Smith Goes To Washington, when Diz asks Saunders where a particular drink is, she says, "It's in the thing... behind the thing."
In Spider-Man, when the "Human Spider" finds out he'll be in an impromptu cage match with "Bonesaw McGraw" (alerted by said cage lowering around the ring, the crowd chanting "CAGE!" repeatedly, and the guards complying with the announcer's request to "PLEEEASE LOCK THE CAGE DOOOOOOOOOOOOORS AT THIS TIIIIIIIME..."
Spidey-"Hey! Unlock the thing! Take the chain off!!!"
The Thing (1982): Unable to come up with a better term for them, the characters refer to the alien species as "Things". The subtitles capitalize this as the proper name for the creatures.
29 years later, most fans of the film still refer to them as "Things".
The Alien movies. Both "Alien" and "Xenomorph" are terms applied to the species, but it seems that no one in-universe has come up with a proper name for them over the course of a few hundred years since their discovery.
In Alien: Resurrection, Call actually refers to the Aliens as "Aliens", over the PA system, talking to the Aliens as if this were their real species name.
According to Ash : "According to Mother, he's a primitive form of encephlepod..."
In Predator 2, the alien species is referred to by Gary Busey's character as "Predators".
Bank robber:(holds up a deadman switch detonator) You know what this is? Hancock: I'm guessing it's some sort of detonator-type deal.
Lots And Lots Of Words And Stuff Between Covers (Literature)
Pops up occasionally in Discworld. There was something similar to "Its eyes were as big as very big eyes"; lampshaded, in that the creature's eyes were traditionally described as being "as big as soup plates", but Tiffany had measured a soup plate and determined that they weren't. A substitute description was needed.
Pratchett really likes these "what's-that-thing" quips. Sourcery has several.
"What's dat fing? Dey goes all crumbly when you eat dem?"
"... could be a lawyer."
"Dey goes soggy if you dips them in somefing?"
"More likely to be a biscuit, then?"
(Some trolls have the full "intelligent but cannot properly express ideas" Buffy Speak trope, though others... don't.)
"Limited wossname. Doodah. Thingy. You know. It's got words in it."
"Dictionary?"
"Yeah, probably."
"The thing that went 'parp' went parp."
Dwarfs, who are too literal to understand simile or metaphor, do this all the time.
Carrot (speaking about his dwarf girlfriend): "She's got a beard as soft as a very soft thing."
or:
"She was as thin as a very thin thing."
There was also law passed by a former Patrician about metaphor and the like. If you're going to say a girl has "a face that launched a thousand ships" she'd damn well better have a champagne bottle for a head.
Granny Weatherwax offers this fine example, which is actually an excellent observation, in Wyrd Sisters: "Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things." (She's talking about stage-prop crowns versus a real crown; It Makes Sense in Context.)
The Confessions Of Georgia Nicolson series uses this trope constantly: "as fine as two fine things on a fine day out in Fineland", "staring like a staring thing", "as mad as two very mad things", "loony as a loon on loon pills."
The Georgia Nicolson books often refer to "snognosity". Not classic Buffy Speak, but definitely related.
"He abused my hospitality," booomed the earl. "I swore that if he ever again entered my domain I would have him gutted and dried like, like something that had been gutted."
Bertie Wooster (in both books and film/TV adaptations) frequently finds himself in the middle of an aphorism he can't complete without Jeeves' help. (The books are almost always narrated by Bertie but with a brilliant, effortless prose that a goof like Bertie would never be able to manage in real life and yet nonetheless seems plausible while you're reading it.)
Bertie: Let me tell you that a man without music in him is fit for... excuse me a moment. Jeeves, what was it Shakespeare said a man without music in him was fit for?
Jeeves: Treasons, stratagems, and spoils, sir.
Occasionally, he'll just barrel on through
Bertie: Jeeves, have you seen that play called I-forget-its-dashed-name?
The hero of H. P. Lovecraft's Beyond The Wall of Sleep is a man whose doctor recognizes as being possessed by some cosmic entity of superhuman intelligence who is struggling to express its metahuman thoughts and ideas through the man's stupid and backwoods brain and vocabulary.
"Big, big cabin with brightness in the roof and walls and floor, and the loud queer music far away..."
In That Hideous Strength, women are described as being able to "speak a language without nouns" when there are no men around and still be understood:
"If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, 'Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' The female for this is, 'Put that in the other one in there.' And then if you ask them, 'in where?' they say, 'in there, of course.'"
In The Warlock by Michael Scott, Virginia Dare saves Billy the Kid from a 'raggedy lion-monster-thingy'. It's a sphinx.
Roswell High certainly uses this. For instance, from the first chapter of the first book "Guys. I'm so tired of their... guyness." Also, this series sort of becomes an interesting example of Buffy Speak, as it even uses the word "wiggins" a few times.
Collapsium is an artificial material made of atoms with their binding energy reduced so they sort of collapse in upon themselves and are binding and heavy and that sort of thing.
Judging by this quote from Dracula, this must be a vampire-hunter thing:
Dr. Seward: [Renfield] seems so mixed up with the Count in an indexy kind of way...
Don Quixote: Sancho doesn’t really understand that the insula he was promised as a Standard Hero Reward means an isle, as we see at Chapter II of the Second part:
"May evil insulas [islands] choke thee, thou detestable Sancho," said the niece; "What are insulas [islands]? Is it something to eat, glutton and gormandiser that thou art?"
"It is not something to eat," replied Sancho, "but something to govern and rule, and better than four cities or four judgeships at court."
The first official description for the Warrior Cats book The Ultimate Guide describes the book as having an "oversized, gift-y trim", whatever that means.
A Ramona Quimby book acknowledges this trope from Ramona's point of view, when she's told not to keep using the word "stuff" and can't see what's wrong with it:
Stuff was a perfectly good, handy, multipurpose word and easy to spell, too.
TV With Real People And Stuff (Live Action TV)
Obviously, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Interestingly, it's never referred to as "Buffy-speak" in the show, but in "I Only Have Eyes For You," Giles refers to it as "Xander-Speak".
Spoofed when we hear a quote from Giles' first diary entry as Watcher.
Her abuse of the English language is such that I understand only every other sentence.
Spoofed again when Riley has to explain that 'buffy' is not an example of this trope, but a girl's name.
Also lampshaded by Spike. See Quotes.
In Dollhouse (another Joss show), there's a lot of hyperactive Buffy Speak from Topher.
The teenagers of Caprica occasionally talk like this. Not terribly surprising, given that several members of the Buffy creative team were also involved in Caprica (particularly Jane Espenson, who was showrunner for the second half of the show's lone season and co-wrote the finale).
In the new Doctor Who's second-season episode "School Reunion," Anthony "Giles" Head makes a blatant shoutout when he calls K-9 (a robot dog with a laser canon) a "Shooty Dog-thing".
Also, in "Blink":
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff. It got away from me, yeah...
[When asked what he did to Apollo 11] A clever thing.
A big mining thing, love a big mining thing. Rio doesn't have a big mining thing.
Yes, it's Spacey Wacey!
It's a thing, it's like a plan but with more greatness.
It's a thing in progress, don't question the thing.
A space-shippy thing! Timey-spacy!
(To Idris): You're just a bitey mad lady! The TARDIS is uppy-downy stuff in a big blue box. (This from a script written by Neil Gaiman, yet)
Don't forget "Explodey-wodey" either.
The season one episode "The End of the World", after the Doctor "upgrades" Rose's mobile, she asks what he did to it, to which he replies "a little bit of jiggery pokery." Rose then quips " 'jiggery pokery'? Is that the technical term?"
Now back to the classic series!
The Fourth Doctor: Yes, pow, pow, pow's a technical expression, Professor, it means that all the microcircuitry will fuse into one great euh! of molten metal.
Blackadder the Third used this once to good effect, since the Blackadders are known for their razor-sharp wits, and because even without a decent metaphor, he still says it with confidence. As he says to Prince George regarding the causes of a threatened peasant revolution, "Disease and deprivation stalk our land like... two giant stalking things."
Also, Melchett in Blackadder II: "You twist and turn like a... twisty, turny thing!".
Blackadder again, in II: "The grave opens before me like... a big hole in the ground."
In II, when Captain Rum accuses Queenie's courtiers of all being lapdogs to a slip of a girl, Blackadder replies "Better a lapdog to a slip of a girl than a... git."
Blackadder combining this with Dissimile and ending with an inverted Metaphorgotten: "We're about as similar as two completely dissimilar things in a pod."
A guy buying flowers at the 2008 RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
BBC Presenter: What have you got there? Guy: I've got a pink fluffy-thing, and a red flowery-thing.
A variation in Firefly: Jayne, talking about Saffron, warns Simon and River, "She'll turn you in faster than you can say... 'Don't turn me in, lady'."
Or Wash: "And we will call it... this land!"
Mal also seems to do it quite often. One example:
Mal: "You want to run this ship?"
Jayne: "Yeah!"
Mal: "Well... you can't."
Another Jayne example features him explaining that looks aren't as deceiving as a low-down, dirty deceiver.
And another:
Badger: "You think you're better than other people!"
Mal: "Just the ones I'm better than."
And another:
Jayne: "If I wanted schoolin', I woulda gone to... school."
River periodically slides into it, but that's more because of her madness and her inability to express her thoughts clearly due to her schizophrenia and the massive emotional and sensory overload she's experiencing due to her brain damage and Psychic Powers.
Sawyer uses its "X-thingy" variant, especially with the nicknames, making it "X-chick/X-guy" :
"She talked to that guy... Bruce-Lee-from-the-freighter."
"That's broken-nose-man's girl."
the "Steal-The-Kid-Off-The-Raft project", the "I-m-an-Other-You-re-an-Other reunion", the "Blow-Up-Everything-That-Can-Get-Us-Off-The-Island tour", ...
In the pilot episode of Farscape astronaut John Crichton gets hold of his first raygun. After accidentally letting off a few shots he decides to try threats instead. This happens a fair bit when A) John doesn't know what to call alien devices/races/things or B) John is trying to describe Earthy things to aliens.
"Don't move, or I'll fill you full of... little yellow bolts of light!"
Red Dwarf, where the characters, knowing nothing about astro-navigation or the area of space they are traveling through, often use terms like "Swirly-thing alert!" Or, on occasion, a "wibbly thing".
Kryten: Is it a wibbly thing or a swirly thing sir?
Cat: At this early stage I'd hate to commit myself and wind up looking a fool!
The pilot is usually the Cat, who navigates space by 'smell' among other things...
Though, once, Arnold Rimmer described somebody as "a total, total ... A word has yet to be invented to describe how totally whatever-it-is you are, but you are one. And a total, total one at that."
In Merlin, the title character describes a sword as "very... swordy".
In Roundhouse (an early '90s Nickelodeon variety show), the character of Dad yells, "Flying out of windows like... things that fly out of windows!"
Often happens to Jack Carter from EUReKA when he has a hard time describing what the town's scientists have come up with to destroy the city this week. A typical example:
Jack Carter: I believe you have a device! That can create a wormhole, or bend time, or make you invisible... A wormholing, time-bending, invisibling device... that shields you from the mind!
Nathan Stark: Yes, he said "invisibling".
Whose Line Is It Anyway? dips into this trope half of the time thanks to its improvisational format. One example of this in the Improbable Mission sketch for the laundry ("The Cat!" for people who don't remember the actual task), when no one but Greg knew what a burnoose actually was:
Ryan: Fabric softener?
Colin: Well you can't have static cling! The burnoose will stick to his... *gestures to body* thing!
Hustle: "Sometimes a bloke has to stand up for... what he stands for."
Becker, from the title character: "Quit hovering over me like... help me out, what hovers?"
Frasier: "It would be hard to sleep, thinking of you in the next room all hot and... hot."
Warehouse 13, "Well I'm guessing 'the gooery'" is Claudiaspeak for the neutralizer distribution machine." Hardly surprising when you consider that Buffy writer Jane Espenson co-created Warehouse 13.
In Stargate SG-1, Colonel O'Neill sometimes talks like this, but it's not always clear whether he's doing it sincerely or for the humor value.
O'Neill: You all know I take great pride in my title as Mr. Positive; however, we did destroy their de-Goa'ulding thing—might not they look unkindly on that?
Even more so the one-shot character Burke in the episode Evolution, part 2.
Burke: Hey, is that that thing that made that guy do that thing?"
In Stargate Atlantis the following dialogue where McKay naming idea is turned down provides a good example of this trope:
Lt. Ford:Gateship One, ready to go.
Maj. Sheppard:Gateship One? A little Puddle Jumper like this?
Lt. Ford: It's a ship, it goes through a gate. Gateship One!
They end up naming it Puddle Jumper
From Teen Wolf: Many of the characters use this on occasion, but Stiles is BY FAR the worst offender during his Motor Mouth tangents.
From Xena: Warrior Princess: Gabrielle describing how to survive a battle when you have no fight experience.
Gabrielle: See the pointy bits on the ends of those swordy things? Stay away from them.
And in "Warrior... Princess":
Diana:[impersonating Xena] Oh, this? This is... my round killing thing.
Smallville: When Jimmy Olsen discovers Clark's secret: "You're some kind of super... guy!"
Frequently deployed by the staff of the White House on The West Wing. Especially bizarre when used by Toby, who is, after all, not only the President's chief speechwriter, but also a man with a keen enough of grasp of the language to name every punctuation mark in it off the top of his head.
For the record, there are fourteen punctuation marks in the English language (according to The Other Wiki). Doesn't sound too bad? Well, did you make sure to include guillemets and solidus?
Bertie: When you have been a little longer in my employ you will come to understand that all my chums rely heavily on your employer's wisdom and knowledge of human nature in the conduct of their affairs. Not to mention my organisational powers, and just plain... thingness!
From the Legend of the Seeker episode "Sanctuary" comes the line, "That swindler's as blind as . . . something . . . that can't see well." It's entirely plausible that the midlands don't have bats. Also, it's possible that halfway through the sentence he remembered that bats actually have excellent eyesight.
Duff from Ace Of Cakes on "The Best Thing I Ever Ate" describes the contents of his favorite pie:
"It's like a creamy, vinegary... thing. I dunno, he'll tell you about it."
Friends: Phoebe to a certain extent, her brother even more so (he described his love for his fiancée as "being with her is like... so much better than not being with her, y'know")
Coupling: In the last episode of the third series, Sally is convinced she's pregnant, so she, Jane, and Susan take tests (they're controls). She comes out of a stall screaming "It's so blue! And liney! It's a blue line of blue lineyness!" She's holding all three...
The normally unflappable Sherlock becomes so flustered when Moriarty straps a bomb to John, and John grabs him and tells Sherlock to run, thus proving himself willing to die for Sherlock that he can only splutter "That, uh... thing... that you, uh... that you did, that you... that you offered to do, that was, ah... good." It's adorable.
Also occurs in "A Scandal in Belgravia," when Mycroft offers Sherlock a cigarette:
Sherlock: Smoking indoors… isn't that… isn't that one of those… law things?
Community: Britta is upset that Annie is bringing in more money than her to help with the Gulf crisis, so she dresses a little slutty and starts acting perky.
Britta: Hi, I need you to give me money to help save the pelicans, because they're, like, feathery and pelicany and stuff!
"Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism" has Annie, who's moved in with Abed and Troy, accidentally destroying Abed's limited-edition DVD of The Dark Knight. When Annie tries to shift the blame by claiming the apartment was robbed of the now-missing disc, Abed speculates that the landlord did it; and Troy (who knows what really happened) responds, "Ooooh, let's not jump to thing-doing!"
"Contemporary Impressionists" had an example of the "Intelligent thought expressed unintelligently" variation:
Jeff: Someone tell Britta what an analogy is.
Britta: I know what it is, it's like a thought... with another thought's... hat on...
The Dean's threat to put Jeff's picture on a Greendale poster unless he convinces Troy to join the football team: "You know, I just realized, we should send these out to local businesses. Law firms, lawyer... companies, legal... gatherings..."
And then there is Chang. Full stop.
She was all dame. Legs that went all the way to the bottom of her torso.
Let her go, like a lobster claw letting go of a small balloon for lobsters.
A matchbook... Something about it seemed cluey.
And yes, those are all from the same episode, "Competitive Ecology"
Then there's the two-parter where Troy builds a blanket fort and Abed builds a pillow fort and they go to war over it. Troy calls his blanket fort "The Legit Republic of Blanketsburg".
NewsRadio used this trope so much that it might as well be called Jimmy Speak.
Mr. James: You're gonna be big, son. Bigger than, say, Dave, what's the name of that guy who's really big?
Dave: Andre the Giant?
Mr. James: No, No, the one who isn't dead yet.
Dave: Oh, Hulk Hogan.
Mr. James: Bingo!
"This is on air talker person Matthew Brock"
Mr. James: I'm going to need one of those thingies you put on your head and talk into it.
Beth: Oh yeah, Peter Frampton Vocoder?
Mr. James: No.
Beth: Darth Vader space helmet?
Mr. James: No.
Beth: Telephone headset?
Mr. James: That's the one.
"I don't know, but there's something bogus in there somewhere..."
Joe: No matter how far technology advances it's still just a bunch of wires connected to other wires.
Beth:So what's wrong with it?
Joe:I can't seem to find any wires...
From the Psych episode "If You're So Smart, Then Why Are You Dead?'':
Goddard: Wait, wasn't Hahn involved in that thing? You remember that thing?
Shockley: The thing with the other thing?
Goddard: Nonono, just the first thing, from five years ago.
Occurs in an episode of Scrubs ("My Balancing Act"): Turk wears a nasal strip (presumably as a breathing aid to improve his bedroom performance and overcome Carla's inability to orgasm), prompting Carla to ask "Why are you wearing one of those nose breathing thingies?"
Marshall, Ted, and Lily often fall into this mode of speaking on How I Met Your Mother, particularly when Robin and Barney aren't around. Stands to reason, as Alyson Hannigan is a Buffy alumn and the show creators are huge Joss Whedon fans.
Radar: Sir, I was walking by and I noticed this gizmo came disconnected from the thingamabob and it wasn't dripping into the doohickey right.
BJ: You lost me with all the technical terms, Radar, but I get the picture.
Henry, too.
Col. Blake: I mean the talk about the, uh, what I'm supposed to talk about.
Col. Blake: General Mitchell, it is both an honor and a privilege and a pleasure to welcome you into that which only through your kind support and generosity are we able to be standing in the middle of it.
From BBC series Me And My Monsters: "human-dad-thingy" and "mummy-human thingy".
Olaf: A thing is like a small thing, Folkmoot's like a bigger thing, it's not to be taken lightly, it's a big thing thing where important things are decided.
Also happens in Seinfeld: Jerry says, " I mean how can I be with someone that doesn't laugh. It's like... well it's like something!"
Heard in Power Rangers Ninja Storm, especially from Dustin. That season practically has its own language.
Also on Charmed: Paige's power of Telekinetic Orbing required her to call objects by name. In the episode "Hyde School Reunion", she doesn't know what to call a demonic acid substance but successfully orbs it back to the demon by calling it "Icky stuff!". In another episode, "A Wrong Day's Journey into Right", she does the same thing using "Weapon... thingy!".
Piper: Icky stuff?
Paige: It worked.
Rick from The Walking Dead sometimes has "stuff" and "things" to do.
A parody of Antiques Roadshow in MAD had a few of the appraisers inspecting the "antiques" with a jeweler's loupe, or as they call it, a "thingamajig that jewelers use".
Pretty Sound Stuff (Music)
They Might Be Giants have a song called "They'll Need a Crane" consisting of this sort of thing. It tells the tale of a dysfunctional relationship in strange metaphor, while referring to the two people only as "Gal" and "Lad".
They do this a lot. In an interview, they were asked what the song "Don't Let's Start" was about. They said, "It's about not let's starting."
Nanobots gives us "Stuff Is Way", which is entirely devoted to examining this trope ("You say stuff is way / Way to go, go away..."). And then there's "Insect Hospital":
Walking down to the insect hospital to set the insects free / 'Cause we are like, literally, literally
Barenaked Ladies have "There's a Word For That" in which they lament not knowing the proper word to describe a certain thingy that's right on the tip of their tongue.
In "O'Malley's Bar", Nick Cave sings about killing one of his victims "with an ashtray big as a really fucking big brick."
Used in the opening for the album cut of Queensrÿche's "Empire"
Answering machine voice: Next message: saved Saturday at 9/24 p.m.
Caller: Sorry, I'm just ... it's starting to hit me like a um ... um ... two-ton heavy thing.
From Pam Tillis' "Spilled Perfume:" "Girl, if I ever saw one, that's an 'I can't believe I did that' look."
From the fictional 1960s pop band The Wonders, stars of That Thing You Do: "And if I know you, you're doing that thing/Ev'ry day, just doing that thing/I can't take you doing that thing you do!"
Carrie Underwood's "Undo It": "You stole my happy, you made me cry/Took the lonely and took it for a ride".
America's "A Horse With No Name": "There were plants and birds and rocks and things..."
Phil Vassar's "Everywhere I Go" has a real gem: "I was living in that happy-to-be-right-where-I-am space/And God knows that's a hard-to-get-to kind of place".
Evildoers, you will cower in fear when he arrives on the scene, as you will be... in big trouble!
"Love Type Thing" from Tegan And Sara's So Jealous album.
"Sex Type Thing" by Stone Temple Pilots is a subversion, in which the Buffy Speak is left on the title.
When Lindsey Stirling is explaining the process of making her music, she describes how she will just do away with dictionary words altogether when trying to express what she wants to do. This is followed with a rather amusing demonstration.
Picture Things In The Paper (Newspaper Comics)
Gary Larson's The Far Side: Some mobsters are interrogating a little man tied up in a chair. "Well," says their leader, "we've tried every device and you still won't talk - every device, that is, except for the one we simply call 'Mr. Thingy.' " The hoodlum then holds up a weird contraption that looks like a cross between a bomb and a Swiss army knife.
ThisCandorville strip: "I'm as bad with analogies as... something else is bad at a thing."
People Who Fight And Stuff For Money And It's Fake (Professional Wrestling)
That Thing Where People Pretend They're Other People In Front Of More People (Stage)
In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Antonio faces off against Claudio and Don Pedro, and he is too angry (or, in some productions, too drunk) to properly articulate his rage. The result is quite entertaining.
"Come boy, come sir boy, come follow me sir boy!"
And who could forget Shakespeare's frequently-used bit of Buffy Speak, Shaped Like Itself?
The Things People Play In Their Dark Basements While Drinking Mountain Dew And Stuff (Video Games)
Right before inadvertently causing the destruction of his home universe, Zetta, main character of Makai Kingdom, exclaims, "Sacred Tome? Ha! More like... sucky... dumb... thing!" It's the first of many indications that, crazy freakin' overlord or not, he's not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Armed And Dangerous, an obscure but fun shooter for the X-Box and PC, had this... like... a lot. Perhaps the worst offender is the Emperor's retarded son, and I mean actually retarded, who has trouble stringing syllables together. Don't get him started on whole sentences.
The Scout in Team Fortress 2, being the youngest and most hyperactive of the nine classes, has this in a bunch of his domination lines. For example, to the Heavy Weapons Guy: "I am owning you, you fat bald fatty fat... fat-fat!" or to the Sniper: "You'll never hit me! You'll never hit my tiny head! It's so tiny, I've got a frickin'... such a tiny little head!".
Travis from Silent Hill Origins, getting more and more peeved about being dragged around Silent Hill by Alessa, holds up a piece of the Flauros he found and yells out: "I got your... your thing for you!"
When Monkey Island got voices, Dominic Armato added this trait to protagonist Guybrush Threepwood.
Alistair from Dragon Age: Origins is guilty of this and gets teased about it by Morrigan. According to Word Of God, quite fitting for this expy of Buffy's Xander.
In the sequel, Hawke sometimes falls into Buffy Speak if s/he tries to lie. Telling Ser Roderick that Hawke saw Conrad sacrifice a goat leads to Hawke stammering "He was talking about how he wanted to do all kinds of... demony things!"
Also when Hawke first learns of Anders ability to Hulk Out into Justice;
In Crash Tag Team Racing, a Park Drone in the Tyrannosaurus Wrecks area, frustrated with Crash for not getting him enough money to leave the park, will exclaim "Again, you come back to haunt me?! Like some kind of haunting thing?! Haunting... and coming back?!"
Mass Effect: Even Commander Shepard is not immune to this... after three hits of the strongest drink on the Citadel, followed by under the counter batarian ale, the bartender offers a krogan drink known as Ryncol.
Grunt, being essentially a krogan teenager, often speaks like this, while trying to either puzzle through his tank-imprints or simply talking outside of combat. On Korlus, the squad will also encounter another tank-bred krogan who is even less experienced and articulate than Grunt, who speaks in Buffy Speak.
As for the piston, did what I could. Just put the thingamajig back in the whatchamacallit.
Portal's "Aperture Science Thing That We Don't Know What It Does"
Portal 2 has some as well. Wheatley's "All right, fatty? Adopted… fatty! Fatty fatty no parents?" and shortly later "What’s wrong with being adopted? Um, well, uh… Lack of parents?".
"Holmes versus Moriarty, Aristole vs MASHY SPIKE PLATE!"
In Super Paper Mario, the villain Mimi constantly uses childish phrases, referring to the heroes as "meanies".
In the 2010 Medal of Honor, Tier 1 operators look and sound a lot less professional than the soldiers in the normal army, though obviously they're much more deadly. In Running With Wolves you're told to "stay stealthy."
Golden Sun: The Lost Age: At one point, Kraden amusingly refers to a ship-powering object as "the thingie... that makes it go."
"You huffy, puffy, loosey-goosey excuse for a whimpering whining wuss of a witness."
"Don't be foolish you foolish fool wearing the foolishly foolish clothes."
One item-of-the-month in Kingdom Of Loathing allows you to temporarily turn into a vampire, at which point one option during exploration lets you meet an obvious Buffy parody, who calls you "Broody Von Stoicpants", and states that she's "a sucker for a brooder. Broodie? One who broods."
Tales Of Graces has one character who is exceptionally prone to this in Pascal. Every other technologically savvy character is prone to just keeping the language simple enough that Asbel and crew can keep up. Pascal, on the other hand, gets an example of this every hour or two.
I Miss The Sunrise has a single instance: Marie refers to the FOCS construct as a "big spinny ring thing" at one point when talking to someone who didn't know its actual name.
Xemnas: Gentlemen, thanks for coming. I'm here to talk about IT. Xigbar: What? Xemnas: Yes... it has done IT. And now she well do THE THING, and now what I told you about will happen to him, and then will happen to HER, when IT is done. Then WE need to do... THE THING. Xigbar: The who the what and the when? Xemnas:' Saix, is IT done? THE THING? Saix: Yes, sir. Xemnas: And Xigbar, is IT ready to do IT? Xigbar: What? Xemnas: IS "IT" READY TO DO "IT"? Xigbar: "sigh" Yeah, yeah, HE is doing IT and IT is HER doing something... whatever you say. Xemnas: What?!?! She did THE SOMETHING?!? We must take action at once!!!!
The Demented Cartoon Movie has "Evil Blah's Evil Lair Type House Thing!", inside of which are the "Evil device thingy!" the generic damsel is chained to and the "Weird evil Machine thing o` doom".
"What was that? Some kind of... kamikaze, type, person?"
The title character of I Am Baby Cakes has a surprising way of expressing the great paradoxes of life and love in simple, childish terms.
Picture Things That Tell A Story On The Internet (Web comics)
Jules: Come along then. You can be my apprentice... or squire... or... whatever.
Van: What does a squire do, Jules?
Jules: I don't know; he squires. We'll look it up in the dictionary later.
Red from Gunnerkrigg Court lapses into this when describing such esoteric concepts like rooms and chairs. "Sitty-downy things," indeed. This is implied to be a function of serious gaps inherent in the education process prior to becoming human, because while chairs are a foreign concept she jabbers off about some seriously advanced nonsense.
Eddie from Emergency Exit has a particularly amusing (especially if you haven't read the story) example here.
Saya also uses this trope on this page while referring to the previous example.
In this strip of Loserz: "You'll be defeated like... like... like... like some easily defeated thing!"
Scary Go Round does this all the time, especially Shelley.
Example:
Amy: I think it's a vampire! Stab it with a stake!
Shelley: We can't do murders on it!
Another, laced with sarcasm:
Amy: I've not been this surprised since I discovered... something desperately unsurprising.
Dechs: You want to catch me, like the spider caught the fly, huh? Well now the spider has become the spided!
At one point in Goblins, huge lizard-man K'Seliss says, "... There is battle happening right now all around me and I'm stuck in this pathetic hut like some... hut... stucky... thing!
In You Damn Kid, the narrator's parents get into an argument because Dad is looking for "the thing for cutting the things" and is angry that Mother doesn't know what he's talking about. "Imagine your parents not speaking for two weeks because Dad can't remember the words for 'toenail clipper'."
"Go ask your mother where that other thing is."
"Other thing?"
In a MegaTokyo strip (link) where Largo tries to explain Leet Speak to Junpei, the best he can do is:
Junpei: What is this "ownz'ed"? You must show me, master from a foreign land!
Largo: It's like this, you know, this l33t thing, that you do when you, like, ownz someone.
Haley's brain feels "like a psion... did some psiony stuff." In fairness, Haley was having a large hangover at the time, and so couldn't come up with a decent metaphor.
Happens frequently in Homestuck, since most of the characters are thirteen years old. Especially notable with John, whose Heir of Breath powers are consistently referred to as "the windy thing". Lampshaded:
EB: I'm going upstairs to the big platformy thing.
TT: The alchemiter?
EB: ??
TT: Try to learn the lingo.
It's a Running Gag that nobody knows what to call the "flappy doodad" that exists on a mailbox and has some trouble coming up with a description that someone else can understand. (The technical term seems to be 'signal flag', by the way, but somehow that's not very satisfying)
Brunel: Where would science be without the Engine? Archaic! Puny! Boring! It doesn't bear thinking about! I'd be able to build gigantic iron ships, certainly - but could they fly? Lovelace: It would indeed be difficult... Brunel: Would Darwin be able to mess around with his, uh... barnacles he won't talk about? Lovelace: Um, that one I'm not sure about... Brunel: Would Faraday be able to that whatsis with the thingamajig?? Lovelace: No! No he would not! Brunel: Now get out there and do whatever the hell it is that you do!!
Cracked's video "If Nature Documentaries Didn't Let Science Get in the Way":
This treestump is a perfect example of our universe. It's covered in bits and stuff, just like all the other bits and stuff covered in bits and stuff in our universe... What is this part that's not those things I just said?
Very often done by the Let's PlayerRaocow, who will often say "Well, that was a thing" or any of a million similar sentences. Some of it Justified by him being French Canadian and French in Quebec having many different ways to say "thing" (see the Real Life section of this page) that just don't translate well into English. The rest is him just playing up his Talkative Loon nature.
Another Let's Play, for Baldur's Gate 2, had Minsc proclaim that the Mace of Disruption was "very disrupty". Minsc isn't too good at the thing with the wordy things at the best of times (unless they involve hilariously over-the-top descriptions of what he's going to do to the bad guys), so it fits.
In the web cartoon Irving, the Socially Awkward Bee, the bees that Irving attempts to hang around with want to leave his presence by saying they have to do "the thing with the thing".
Most of the main cast of Red vs. Blue falls into this at one point or another, but Caboose seems particularly prone due to his status as The Ditz.
Tucker:"My sword? Fuck yeah, I know how to use that! What's to understand about "swish, swish, stab"!?"
Ray William Johnson does this from time to time on =3, mainly because he tries to come up with a joke against your mom but fails.
Ray: ... in a... mom... throwing-contest. Shut up!
The Deus Ex Human Revolution-inspired Unreal Revolutionmodification for the first Deus Ex (re-read the sentence if you need, we swear it makes sense) makes large use of this trope. "Use this to turn off the sparky hurt light", indeed.
177. I am not to refer to a formation as "the boxy rectangle thingie".
Most of the Whateley Universe stories are centered around teens at the Superhero School Whateley Academy, so it's inevitable. Solange has a tendency to slip into Buffy Speak whenever she's upset. Aquerna sometimes does when she's busy being a Motor Mouth.
In the Opinionated Reviews of one SF Debris, Chuck will often point out when something is on the list of things that are as bad as a very bad thing. God help you if you pull something from the list of things that are worse than a very bad thing.
...this was trying to mimic a cartoon world that was already a cartoon world but make it more cartoony because it's in reality, and...I don't...this movie has made me not make word senses that I can complete formally in this period.
TV With Cartoony People And Stuff (Western Animation)
Abis Mal from Aladdin: "I'll rule [Aggrabah] like some... big... ruler guy!"
Jake: Watch this everybody! A cooler! With... stuff for the thing!
Another one:
Finn: Let's just give him some purple-whatevers. Jakes: ... You mean the grapes? Finn: ... Yeah, whatever.
In one episode of The Simpsons, Principal Skinner is searching for Bart, who cut school on the same day of an accident in the Quimby mansion. Bart escapes across a rope bridge and cuts it, thinking that Skinner won't walk into the raging river that separates the two. In Terminator-like fashion, Skinner walks under the water, barely changing his facial expression, at which point Bart quips, "He's like some sort of... Non-Giving-Up School Guy!" According to the writers, this was written after a long session in which they couldn't come up with anything clever for Bart to call Skinner.
Also:
Homer: Marge, where's that... metal dealy... you use to... dig... food...?
Marge: You mean a spoon?
Homer: Yeah, yeah!
Also also:
Homer: Oh Lisa, you and your stories! Bart is a vampire! Beer kills brain cells! Now let's go back to that... building... thingy...w here our beds and TV... is."
Also also also:
Nelson: Way to breathe, no-breath.
And:
Lionel Hutz: I move for a bad court-thingy.
Judge Snyder: You mean a mistrial?
Hutz: Yeah! That's why you're the judge, and I'm the... law-talking-guy.
Homer, upon meeting the editor of Reader's Digest:
"I especially love the Build Your Vocabulary section! That thing is really, really, really... good."
Homer enters a superstore:
"So many things, and so many things of each thing!"
Homer: I want you to pull the thing, next to the other thing."
Homer in "Dead Putting Society"
Homer: That putter is to you what a bat is to a baseball player, what a violin is... to the—the guy that—the violin guy!
In the episode "Yokel Chords":
Yokel Girl: Hey, ain't you one of them funny, big-nosed showbiz people?
Krusty: Oh, you mean a clown?
Yokel Girl: No, a J-
Krusty: (quickly and nervously) -oker! Yeah! And I'm not a practicing joker, so I'm not offended! Heh, heh, heh!
Professor Frink's theme song? "He'll run around, and then he'll do... the thing... with the person..."
In an episode of Rocko's Modern Life, Rocko gets angry at his broken old vacuum cleaner: "You're useless and pathetic, like a useless and pathetic thing!"
Futurama. But Bender need brain! For smart-making!
Leela: Oh no! He's siphoning our energy and becoming stronger!
Fry: Like a balloon and... something bad happens!
Or alternatively...
Fry: Hey, wait! I'm having one of those things! You know, a headache with pictures.
Bender: I'm done recomfoobulating the energy-motron... or whatever.
Hattie's entire schtick is based around this, often referring to everything as a "kajigger."
Invader Zim. As in, every single character. This includes Zim ("I might as well make your entire brain... nn-not smart no more."), The Almighty Tallest ("Our big... space ship... gang!"), and Dib ("Score nothing for the Zim... thingy... race."), to name a few.
"I now leave you to your... Moosey fate."
Also created by Jhonen Vasquez is Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, home of "Crazy! Like some crazy thing that's all . . . crazy!"
"I can't let him get away with that... that... thing-he-do!"
Sokka: Well look at you, Buster. Now that your firebending is gone, I guess we should call you The Loser Lord! Ozai: I am the Phoenix King! Uh... (falls over) Toph: Oh sorry. Didn't mean to offend you, Phoenix King-of-getting-his-butt-whooped! Suki: Yeah! Or how bout King of the... guys who... don't win? Toph: Leave the nicknames to us, honey.
Actually used quite a bit by Sokka. For one, his first name for Combustion Man, Sparky Sparky Boom Man. Another (albeit drug fueled): "Cactus juice, it's the quenchiest!"
Both of The Angry Beavers used the word "thingy" repeatedly. Really, the series was full of this trope. One episode is actually titled "Big Round Sticky Fish Thingy".
Daggett: Desperate times call for desperate desperate-ness...!
Storm Hawks, while Junko is portrayed as quite smart for his species, he's not quite a genius. "The Beacon! It's stopped... beaconing!"
Junko mentions that as a child, he was picked on for being more intellectual than your average Wallop; he's the only Wallop that plays a major role in the series, though, so we really have no baseline for where your average Wallop falls on the scale of thinking versus hitting things.
Monique Speak in Kim Possible, as well as slang outside of the show's trope namer.
Ron Stoppable frequently is guilty of this.
"Oh, that's right, Sensei can do that weird floaty thing!"
Kim: "We have to time this so that hovery guardy thing doesn't see us."
Earthworm Jim had some of this. For example, in one episode Jim takes a Doppelganger -creating gun and Evil Jim says "Give that back you... Thing-taker guy!"
One of the other evil characters at one point threatens, "I will crush you like an easily-crushed thing!"
"Now I'll freeze you as solid as... uh... a solid freezy frozen thing." "Oook oook eeek!" "Oh right. Thank you! A block of ice!"
Starfire from Teen Titans sometimes does this. She has a better excuse than most, as she's an alien and English is not her native language. Even without the language issues, though, she's still definitely the Team Ditz.
In Dave The Barbarian, Dark Lord Chuckles the Silly Piggy taunted Dave with, "You shall perish beneath the might of my... mighty... mightiness!"
Skeeter's father in Doug initially suffers from this because the room is so noisy he can't hear himself think. Later he's Flanderized into doing this all the time.
Frisky Dingo — "And I would not call that making love. I would call that... the Shame Spear... of... Hurt..."
Home Movies "It's Shannon! You can tell by his... thing."
An episode of Dexter's Lab involved Dexter giving a dog he found the ability to speak, which resulted in the dog repeatedly referring to one of Dexter's machines as "the thing."
Toad Patrol actually incorporated this as a regular form of speech for the toadlet characters known as "toad speak." Since they didn't know all the words for things, concepts such as nighttime were expressed in manners such as "the deep deep blue has turned to black." Rain was "falling wet."
Bush: Who dares question my... daring... of his... dare... jerk!
In the Family Guy parody of Star Wars called "Blue Harvest", Grand Moff Tarkin (Adam West) threatens to use the Death Star's "planet-blower-upper-gun" on Alderaan. After Leia's (Lois) Big "NO!", he hesitates.
In The Fairly OddParents Timmy proudly described himself as "fast . . . as a really strong animal, and as strong . . . as a really strong animal!"
And he also doesn't like his cops being flung around on a big spatula thingy.
Used in Rugrats, when the baby Chucky keeps a lucky... object in his pocket that all the babies are familiar with, but none have a word for. (It's a bottlecap.) It is simple referred to as "Chucky's lucky... thing", complete with the pause while the babies search for the word.
In Archer, "It's an art that can't be taught, like a poet's... mind for the... to make... the perfect word."
In an episode of Total Drama World Tour the cast has to find some barrels of oil buried in Drumheller's badlands as a challenge. Cody complains that "There must be twenty miles of badlands. It's like looking for a needle in... twenty miles of badlands!"
From "Suited for Success", after Rarity believes her career is ruined by a disastrous fashion show:
Rarity:(throwing herself down on her bed) Leave me ALOOOOONE! I vant to be alone! I want to wallow in... whatever it is that ponies are supposed to wallow in!
In "Applebuck Season", a sleep-deprived Applejack shows up to receive a trophy:
Applejack: Thank you kindly for this here... award thingy.
Rarity: Fortunately, I can get along with anypony, no matter how rude she may be. Applejack: Oh, yeah? Well, I'm the get-alongingest pony you're ever gonna meet! Rarity:That's not even a word.
In "The Return of Harmony, Part 2", Twilight Sparkle lapses into this while distributing the Elements of Harmony, after being extremely frustrated with her brainwashed friends:
Necklace, necklace, necklace, necklace, and... big crown thingy!
Buford: (to Perry the Platypus) "Don't worry, little ducky thing..."
Joseph of King of the Hill tends to speak in Buffy Speak from time to time:
IT'S LIKE MY HEART IS A REALLY SAD MAN
Other Things And Stuff And... Things
In the Tabletop RPGCosmopol, the character Keller speaks like this to the point that others call his distinct speech pattern "Keller Speak". Justified in that he is not a native English speaker.
No, sometimes he speaks like that in his native German, too.
There's a snowclone joke out there that goes, "There's only two kinds of people in this world: Those who are good with words, and those who are... umm... uh... Thingy."
And:
What is brown and sticky?
A stick!
I feel in my gut that Stephen Colbert's clever Neologism Truthiness is Buffy Speak at its finest.
Comic actor Steve Martin's stand-up routines frequently employ this trope.
"Because a day without sunshine is like, you know, night."
"Some people have a way with words... and some people... uh... not have way, I guess."
Stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard described his playing of the clarinet as sounding like "a foghorn being dragged through... uh, a place where a foghorn should not be dragged."
And, in a bit about toasters, said that "they have a turny-button thing... it's called a 'turny-button thing.'"
Somewhere between this trope and Exactly What It Says on the Tin: after something falls off his aircraft in flight, a pilot must fill out a TFOA (Things Falling Off Aircraft).
This Lyttle Lytton Contest winner: "The general, one might have said, had a sly, sneering-smile expression upon his face."
It also has a monster that almost always causes this reaction
That Real Existing Place That Is Non-Fictional And Exists(Real Life)
It's common for little kids to speak like this.
In a way, kennings are a form of this. One of the more famous ones, Beowulf, translated as "bee-hunter", is an Old English kenning for bear.
These euphemisms were formed because it was considered bad luck to speak the bear's true name. Most European cultures have various different names for the same animal, and the ones nowadays accepted as its real name ("bear", for instance) are actually euphemisms used so widely that the original name was forgotten. Bears are Serious Business.
He might have had in mind "this and that and the other thing," which was a common mid-20th century expression indicating, "There are many examples, but I don't feel like naming them all right now." Many middle-aged Americans were still using the idiom as the 1990s drew to a close.
He did name the other things, in the previous line which is almost always cut out of the soundbite. It all makes sense in context:
But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard!
The French spoken in Quebec has a wide, wide range of words that mean "thing" (chose, patente, truc, cossin, bidule, and the list goes on), although sometimes with a slightly different connotation. They are frequently used in non-formal conversation, with context and non-verbal communication helping interpretation of the word.
Combining them is perfectly valid too: "Passe-moi le truc-machin-chouette-bidule," would easily translate as "Pass me the thing-thingy-stuff-thing."
This also works for metropolitan French, except the order of the words is different. A non-exhaustive list of words for "thing" would go: truc, machin, bidule, trucmuche, chose, machin-chouette...
Also in Swedish, with a small selection being: Sak; apparat; apparatur; grej; mojäng; mackapär; grunka.
German and Japanese are languages that both make heavy use of compound words by just sticking two words together. The words "Zeug" and "mono" both mean "things" and are used in combination with all kinds of word. (The German "Zeug" originally meant "gear" as in "equipment", but has come to be a generic term for "stuff" when used alone).
Japanese: "Tabemono" (eat-stuff/food), "kaimono" (buy-stuff/things you bought), "Kimono" (dress stuff/clothing). The same applies to words with "butsu", such as "doubutsu" or "hakubutsu".
Esperanto: The suffix -aĵ- means essentially "the physical substance associated with". "Bovo" (cow) + "-aĵ-" = "bovaĵo" (beef). "Segi" (to saw) + "-aĵ-" = "segaĵo" (sawdust). "Aĵo" by itself just means "stuff".
Turkish: The suffixes -cı,-ci,-cu,-cü,-çı,-çi,-çu and -çü mean "- person". It's mainly used to define professions: "dişçi" (tooth-person/dentist), "demirci" (iron-person/smith), "yolcu" = (way-person/traveler).
Kneadatite, a self-hardening paste that is used extensively used in miniature sculpting, is almost universally known as "green stuff".
People with anomic/dysnomic forms of the mental disorder aphasia often have difficulty retrieving words from memory and come up with awkward circumlocutions to describe something that they cannot name. A person with this condition might know what an apple is and how it tastes, but might be unable to name it, instead calling it something like "that crunchy fruit that grows on trees".
English speakers who want to describe something they don't have a word for sometimes employ the French "je ne sais quoi", usually to mean something like "unique character", as in, "He has a certain je ne sais quoi." While Everything Sounds Sexier in French, such sentences seem really silly if you consider that "je ne sais quoi" literally means, "I don't know what."
Well, "A certain I-don't-know-what" is a phrase with the same meaning in English.
... because it's a direct translation of the French phrase!
This tendency is not only found in English. The Polish word "wichajster" means a thing that either has no name or a thing whose name the speaker doesn't recall (it usually refers to a machine or part thereof, or some sort of gadget, but anything can be described by the word). And "wichajster" is pronounced exactly like "Wie heist er", which means "what is it called" in German.
German knows "das gewisse Etwas", which means "the certain something", which is just as vague and is used in the same way.
The 19th century brought English such expressions as "doohickey" and "thingamabob."
When Sarah Palin asked, "How's that hopey, changey thing working out for ya?" at the first-ever national Tea Party Convention, some of us wondered if Joss Whedon had suddenly, inexplicably been employed as her speech writer.
For those who haven't paid attention to American politics lately, or have just had their heads under a rock, this was an allusion to Barack Obama's campaign slogans of "hope and change." Which she was making fun of.
While on the subject of Republicans, some of old No.43's bushisms strayed in the direction of Buffy Speak. "Tribal sovereignty means just that; it's sovereign. You're a - you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity."
As stated above, Joss Whedon himself — in interviews, one can practically see the Buffy script flowing forth as he speaks. Also, Jim Butcher has fallen into this a couple of times, perhaps.
Some very studious teens, especially those cramming for standardized tests, will have an immense vocabulary but no clue how to use those words properly, thus leading to a strange mix of Buffy Speak and Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness.
If you ever work in technical support, expect to see this a lot. Many peoples are completely unable to properly describe a technical problem.
If you work in a home and garden or domestic supply store, such as Bed, Bath & Beyond, you will encounter this trope on a daily basis. No exceptions.
"Do you carry that rectangular inflatable dealie that you put ice in?"
L33t is a form of this trope although some circles consider it an actual language.
Dialect or jargon perhaps, but not a language. And only applicable through writing.
L33t would be an alternate writing system of the Latin alphabet since it's just written, with some jargon thrown in for good measure.
This trope is sadly common when speaking foreign languages you're relatively new to. Whatever education the speaker had was probably only focused on general, common vocabulary (exceptions being "medical Spanish" courses, etc.) so the speaker is limited to a very unspecialized vocabulary and has to get creative when trying to explain to a confused ER patient that the doctors are going to put in an IV to keep them from dehydrating.
Modern linguists incidentally consider it an important skill to know how to speak around a word that you don't know, and there are several scientific studies on the subject.
Speaking of speaking around a word you don't know, the word for this (in English) is "circumlocution". Useful stuff.
In Chile, the word 'wea' and its derivates can mean absolutely anything and anyone. It can get very confusing for a non-chilean to understand which thing is the 'wea' we are referring to.
The same in Colombia with the word 'vaina', except it's never used on people, hence being translated as a very localized version of "thing", and being one of the few words used by everyone regardless of region/accent.
In the immortal words of the Danish Prime minister Lars Løkke "Those who earn more, and pay a lot, and now pay a little less. Well they pay more-less, than those who earn a little less, and pay less, thus paying less-less"
Britney Spears tends to talk like this if she hasn't organized what she's talking about in her head yet. If she knows what she's talking about though, prepare to be blown away by her literacy and well spoken-ness.
An early 20th century Norwegian law referred to motorized vehicles as "driving things"
Primates learning human sign language typically string together monosyllabic English words in order to express relatively complex concepts. Koko the gorilla, for one, famously referred to a mask (in ASL) as an "eye hat."
Much of the Chinese language is constructed this way. Since everything is in abstract characters, it's only considered natural to keep tacking simple words onto a chain until you've got a fully developed concept. Examples: The Chinese word for "love" is ai. Aiguo means "patriotic" ("love country"). Airen gives us "husband" or "wife" ("love person"); and aizibing translates to "AIDS" ("love disease"), though the last one can also be viewed as transcription.
Japanese is also big on Buffy Speak from a grammatical standpoint. All demonstratives, and also mono and koto often only serve to exacerbate confusion in a world that is elusive as it is. Exhibit A (at 13.). This is compounded by throngs of Chinese loanwords (see above) that a speaker has to live with.
A Con Lang called Toki Pona has this as its basic premise. It has only hundred-something roots, and words are formed from them exactly this way.
And its Evil Twin, Russian mat that has only six or seven roots that are all Cluster F Bombs. * In mat, you can compose complex, perfectly legitimate and meaningful (in context) sentences completely out of swear words, sometimes even working with one word base per sentence. This phenomenon is depicted in Russian humour; for example, in jokes about construction workers or engineers forced by the new superior (or a foreign consultant) to stick to decent language. This results in their inability to communicate and complete their tasks.
A toaster manufactured by Breville has an "A Bit More" button.
Literal translations from polysynthetic languages, many of them Native American, can sound like this. E.g. the Navajo for tank (when they don't just say "tank" in the middle of a Navajo sentence), chidí naaʼnaʼí beeʼeldǫǫhtsoh bikááʼ dah naaznilígíí is "cart that crawls around with a big-boom-maker sitting on top".note Even more literally, "cart, it crawls on the ground, and it-makes-a-big-boom is on its top"—Navajo forms agentive nouns ("-er") by what's called "terpsimbrotos".Note that in speech that whole beast is rattled off as one huge word.
In Nahuatl, it's especially noticeable when comparing modern colloquial Nahuatl to Classical Nahuatl, because Classical had a style rule that limited compounds to two elements plus endings, while modern Nahuatl will just stack on strings of elements. Modern Nahuatl would probably sound very rambling to the pre-Columbian Aztecs, who probably instituted the "two element" limit precisely to avoid that (as in most cultures, rhetoric was an important part of their conception of statecraft, and rambling tends to make for bad speeches).
