About 2 w or 3 weeks ago there was an audio essay by a Washington Post writer, on NPR, I believe his name is Joel Achenbach, about this "linguistic inexactitude" that more and more people are experiencing. He calls it the 'thing, thing' where instead of finding the exact word for an object, we use the word "thing" so often either because we have become lazy or we truly do not know the names of many quite not-common objects.

chronist