that’s what he said
“Where is my thing, Mary?”
“What thing is that, Timmy?”
“My thing that is over the other thing that goes in by a thing.”
Oh, okay then.
If there was one word I would happily remove from the English language, it would be “thing”, home and harbour of the imprecise and lazy.
Oh! Wait! My thoughts had wandered a bit there, and I was no longer talking about Timmy. Well, he’s certainly imprecise, but given that he’s three years old, I think we can cut him a little slack. But if he’s still doing that when he’s a teen? I pity his teachers.
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It's Not All Mary Poppins 
How about the word “nice”? That could be scrapped at the same time.
It is a very long story with sordid details and drinking but we don’t use the word thing when our brain stops and we are trying to fill in the blank. Instead we use “Spanish Fellow.” You know, “Hey, Hon, where is the Spanish Fellow.” It makes the game even more painful.
I would remove the word “huh”. My two-year old’s response to every single thing I say at the moment, is ….HUH?
Its then a toss up between repeating what I said, telling him to say pardon, not HUH or just doing it myself.
Ack, I get this sort of imprecision from Maya constantly. She’ll refer to something (from another room, usually yelled) with a nondescript pronoun and I’m somehow supposed to magically discern the object about which she’s speaking.
More often than not, this happens when I’m in the shower. She’ll be five in September. When do kids learn (I mean REALLY internalize) “wait” again?