Buffy Speak / Web Original

• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog features this prominently, unsurprisingly since it's a Joss Whedon production.
  • Dr. Horrible:
    "Moist! My evil... moisture... buddy!"
    "I would never turn my back on a fellow... laundry-person..."
  • Captain Hammer does it too, though he's not exactly intelligent:
    "She turned me on to this whole homeless... thing..."
    (quoted on the news) "I hope to set an example, for, you know, children and stuff."
    "Oh, momma! Someone maternal!"
• Kickassia: "WELL I'M SCIENCIER!"
• 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?
  • From 4 Things Nobody Tells You About Food Allergies:
    Over the last few decades, food allergies and intolerance have been skyrocketing like a rocket that's going up into the sky really really fast.
• Very often done by the Let's Player raocow, 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 II, 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.
• When Chuggaaconroy spots Suicune out and about in his Pokémon Crystal Let's Play, he exclaims:
  Chugga: Oh my god, it's that thing! That thing with the stuff and the thing^note Entei and Raikou from the thing!^note the Burned Tower
• 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!
• In one Vlogbrothers video:
  Hank Green: I shot down that like a... like a...
  John Green: Like a shooter down a shoot thing!
  (Caption: I'm a writer.)
• A significant portion of the hilarity of My Drunk Kitchen is thanks to this trope.
• In Echo Chamber's Trope Of The Week Dumbass Has a Point Zack trying to explain "After Effects".
  Zack: It's... the thing with the things!
• Happens in a couple of Two Best Friends Play videos; "Sneaky-stab mode" and "You're science-ing right now!"
• The Deus Ex: Human Revolution-inspired Unreal Revolution modification 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.
• This episode of Mr. Mendo's Hack Attack: "But really, that was a good movie, and this film and a good one are as dissimilar as two completely dissimilar things... in a bag."
• The name of the website http://www.sciencystuff.com/
• Stuff You Like's Sursum Ursa does this in her Moriarty episode:
  Sursum Ursa: ... and he has mood swings like... a very... swingy... thing!
• From Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series:
  Kaiba: Duel me, you... uh, weird, cyborg, kind of... burn victim... person.
• Friendship is Witchcraft
  Rarity: Why would I spend my afternoon with a bunch of war criminals and their... war... crimes?
• Skippy's List has examples:
  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 this whenever she's upset. Aquerna sometimes does when she's busy being a Motor Mouth.
• Kube from AJCO is a repeat offender. As they're also Sir Swears-a-Lot it can make their speech rather hard to listen to—for example, when explaining a date to their girlfriend, who has never been on one:
  <Kube> You just do stuff… but it’s like. Special stuff. Like holding hands and junk.
• 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.
• Rainbow Dash often resorts to this when new Homestuck stuff comes up.
• Doug Walker, while discussing the worst movies he watched for The Nostalgia Critic, describes Inspector Gadget (1999) like so:
  "...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."
  • After giving a negative review of the toy Teddy Ruxpin, the toy somehow comes to life and, in a plot out of The Twilight Zone, goes on the warpath against the Critic for the review. When the Critic sees that Teddy has somehow come alive, he exclaims disbelievingly, "You're not real! You're just... a thing... that's not very real!"
• Atop the Fourth Wall: Linkara proclaims, after something very stupid in Battle for Bludhaven, that he broke something in his "thinking thing".
• Mitch and Mary Morpotzner from Database Ranger's Power Reviews tend to speak this way at times. While watching a choreographed fight scene during the review episode of "The Wild Wipeout" from Power Rangers Ninja Storm, Mitch describes the Rangers doing "punchy flippy kicky things."
• Not Always Right: Problem: Thing is blue and blue on the thing.
• Not Always Friendly: This story has a missionary in El Salvador trying and failing to convince a local plumber that she is from the area. He's finally convinced when she loses a ring in the drainpipe and resorts to the Salvadorian word for "thingamajig" to explain it to him.
• PBS Idea Channel combines this with Take That! while the host briefly makes a comparison between Breaking Bad and Lost.
  "Breaking Bad is up there with Lost on the list of shows encouraging fan theory about what will happen next, the major difference being that on Breaking Bad, unlike Lost, there is actually a return on your thinking investment since stuff...actually...MEANS...things."
• Third Rate Gamer says that in the old commercials, Cool Spot "would walk around and stuff."
• MrBtongue of Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage combines this trope with Sophisticated as Hell, especially when he coins the terms "reverse complaining" and "talky and techy sci-fi".
• "End Times" uses this a lot, since most of the characters are college-aged kids way out of their realm of experience.
  • In season two, the Assembly is chiefly referred to as "the Thing" (sure, it's technically a reference to Viking culture, but the Archivist sure doesn't know that).
• Lewis Brindley frequently indulges in this, to the point that his fandom has devoted an entire subreddit to it.
• Christopher Odd does this a lot, as he frequently forgets the actual names of enemies in games and just calls them by their physical description.
• Hobo Bros: In "Squidella gears up for SPLATOON 2", Luke decides to make the protagonist Squidella a very popular fighter, but he can't think of the right words, leading him to describe her as "one of the most championship people".
• Andrew Rea, the host of Binging with Babish, occasionally forgets the names of ingredients or utensils, and refers to them by their description instead.
• Lindsay Ellis describes Brother Bear as "taking the concept of spirit animal to a very literal...literal...ness".
• TB Skyen, while playing Dark Souls, having encountered a suspicious-seeming character in a cell in this video:
  Skyen: I'm just gonna...I'm just gonna not with him. He...no.
• Luke Westaway of Outside Xbox, being confronted with a picture of Isaac Caldiero:
  Luke: Is this a wrestling?
• In one of Dream's Minecraft Manhunts, Bad calls the Striders (the animals in the Nether that can ride on lava) "things."
• Formula 1: The fact that the drivers are concentrating on making sure they can react to everything at the high speeds they're traveling and many are not native English speakers can lead to some people forgetting the names of things in the moment and other odd sentences over team radio:
  • "OK, there's that animal running around the track. Before turn 6. In the middle of the track. I don't know what they're called."—Kimi Räikkönen, 2019 Canadian Grand Prix (FP3)
  • "Did I send it‽ Or did I.. don't didn't send it?"—Carlos Sainz Jr., 2019 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
• TikTok comedian Dez The Lez often talks about how her Puerto Rican mother will forget the English word for things and come up with descriptive terms that...aren't wrong but can be pretty bizarre, like when she talked about taking Dez's cousins to the mall and letting them ride on the "horse tornado." It took Dez a minute to realize her mom meant the carousel. Other examples include "bag of fire" for hot air balloon and "lobster spider" for scorpion. In many cases the English word she's looking for isn't far off from the Spanish one, like scorpion and escorpión (which Dez lampshades), but she'll still blank on it.
• In one Playframe video playing Overcooked!, when Carrie claims to not know much about "sport things", Dan jokingly claims to know all about "sport things" and especially about curveballs.
  Carrie: What's the trajectory of an average curveball?
  Dan: ...Forward.
  Carrie: Describe it algebraically.
  Dan: Forward but curvy-like.
• Highcraft: Travis frequently engages in this type of language, such as struggling to remember the word for flint and steel, and managing to say "flint and fire steel" instead.

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