A WORD, PLEASE — thing

continuity: Next, Professor Aubrey Vellum, with the word we grab when every other word has gone missing, and it has a far grander past than you'd guess.

the verdict: You know that moment when you're hunting for the thing, the little thing, the one that opens the jar, and your brain simply hands you back a shrug? We've all stood at the kitchen drawer, waving our hands at it.

a word, please: Thing. A word, please.

the crack: Long ago, the Germanic peoples who would become the English had a word, thing, and it first meant a meeting set for an appointed time. Not just any meeting, either. A thing was the great open-air assembly, where free men gathered under the sky to settle their quarrels and make the law. Our Old English ancestors wrote it with a lovely old letter called thorn, þing , and said it much the way we do. Now, people love to say thing comes from think, 'whatever can be thought of,' or that the Vikings handed it to us. Lovely stories, both of them, and neither is true. The Norse did have the very same word, and Iceland still calls its parliament the Althing, but that's a cousin, not a parent. Our thing came down the English family line all on its own.

the collision: Then, over the centuries, the word began to wander. First it slid from the meeting itself to the matter being argued there, so your thing was your case, your dispute. Then it widened to any affair or happening at all. And by the time of Middle English, it could be any object whatsoever: a spoon, a stone, the whatsit in the drawer. So the next time you say 'the thing is…' and the whole table leans in to listen, notice what you've just done. You've called a little assembly to order.

the glimmer: We don't throw our important words away. We use them so often that they wear smooth, like a stone step worn down by a thousand feet.

the exit: That's the word. Go on, call a thing to order today.