In Collier’s in 1949, Richard B. Gehman identified a troubling feature of American language — the tendency to refer to specific things vaguely.

“Say, what about all those things in the front room?” his wife had asked him, supposing that he knew what she meant. “I didn’t,” Gehman wrote. “For all I knew, ‘those things’ could have been the furniture, books, rugs, magazines, lamps, or the remnants of a sandwich I’d been eating.”

Some more examples:

• “Here,” my wife said, “you can take these. … Put them with those things behind the others.”
• “Remember the girl from the place with the stuff? Well, she’s here.”
• “The men came today.” (Gehman tried asking, “What did you tell them?”, but she only answered, “I told them to go ahead.”)
• “Do you remember that time we were at the shore, and it rained?”
• “When was it that we had the Coes over?”
• “The woman’s here for the money.”
• “What was the name of that couple we met the time we went to the Zeamers’?”
• “What’s the name of that fellow who drives the truck?”

A neighbor appeared at Gehman’s door one day and asked his help in repairing a washing machine — his wife had said that the thing on its side was acting funny. “He sighed, and asked if I had anything to drink in the house.”