I had this thing to get and couldn’t remember it. All I could hear was I needed this for that. It’s a habit in my family, where we use the words ‘this’ ‘that’ and ‘there’ alarmingly often to substitute words we can’t get at the moment. Mostly, it works; we know what ‘this’ or ‘that’ is being referenced at the moment. Sometimes, it gets you in trouble. One rainy afternoon, I remember being screamed at by mom, for not getting the clothes off the line in time. She insisted she told me hours ago, I was adamant she hadn’t. It then dawned that she did tell me to get ‘this’ from ‘there’. With no reference to put context to either, I fell short.
Regular placeholders like Whatchamacallit or Whatshisname or even Thing'em-bob never caught in my house. We were having so much fun figuring out ‘this’, ‘that’ and ‘there’. My extended family too indulged in the extensive use of these placeholders, which made me wonder if this was some genetic defect or a family tradition passed on. Often, we would deliberately pretend to be obtuse and come up with random, unconnected items to fill in the blanks, much to their consternation, till they would scream, “Pass me the hammer, you dolts!”
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