A Watchamacallit and a Thingamabob

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When I was little during the summers that I spent with other kids playing out in the Catskill Mountains at a summer place some Latvian friends of my parents owned I learned a lot of interesting things. It was information that kids pass to kids and of course if you asked the grown-ups they would say don’t listen to such nonsense. Well two very interesting words I learned were watchamacallit and thingamabob. Looking up in the search I just discovered that my friends knew what they were talking about because watchamacallit is a term you use for things you don’t know or can’t remember the name of. Thingmabob refers to things you don’t know the name of or things that don’t actually exist. So they are pretty close in meaning and for us kids these were great words to say because they sounded so funny. I would pass my new learned knowledge on after I returned from my summer vacation and returned to school. Well one smart aleck kid who was like me and spoke both Latvian and English decided to trick his grandpa. Grandpa being a Latvian immigrant was always confused by the English language so his grandson passed his seven year old knowledge onto him. He went shopping with grandpa and as they were looking at things in a hardware store his grandpa asked him how he could ask the salesperson if a certain part would fit into a certain fixture. I don’t know what the grandpa was looking for but he wanted to know for example if a certain bulb would fit into a certain fixture. So his grandson told him what to say. Grandpa took the two items in question and went over to the salesperson. He showed him both items and asked, “Does this watchamacallit go into this thingamabob?” Well I know if I was the salesperson I would have been rolling in the aisles. I just couldn’t help it if someone said something so preposterous to me. As I remember the story which parents kept repeating ended that the salesperson understood that his impish and smiling grandson was responsible for the old man’s question and he informed him what each piece was called and how it all came together. Aren’t kids just amazing?