...That is hilarious and adorable. What do you do when you want to describe something weird and unfamiliar and don't know enough about it to apply a real noun?

Invent one! they both say simultaneously.

And you don't wind up with anything that would translate as 'thingy'? You're always more precise than that?

Well, now we have something that would translate as thingy. But usually I'd try to be precise because I'd expect that the maker of whatever it is wanted to hear ideas for words for it.

A lot of times thingies turn out to already have words and it just means you can't call them to mind. Like, I don't know, 'what's that black thingy over there', 'it's a hitching post from before we invented the horseless carriage'.

Which is why it's a useful word! But when we don't know the words for things it's often because they're entirely new, and so that situation has not arisen as often as 'what's that black steel-line over there?' 'we're still deciding!'

I guess maybe there are just more things around in my world. From far away or whatever. Pax has a habit of borrowing words from other languages, more than most languages do.

And most of the things weren't invented in the last ten years.

Things are invented all the time on my plane, although not necessarily in an interesting way, just new outward designs for this and that.

As we grow as a people I'm sure we'll keep inventing things, but it'll become likelier that any given unfamiliar thing has an established name.

And now you have a word for thingies like that.

They both laugh delightedly. "I want to be brought plain berries, so I can't smudge my work if I eat while writing," Fëanáro says.

"You could eat with your other hand," Bella points out.

"Yes, but to be safe."

"You remember that eating, if that's all you do, is one of the things that doesn't slow down recharge, right?"

"Huh." He frowns. "What about cooking food, does that count? Does embroidery?"

"Cooking is too active and I don't know about embroidery - it might be like reading and count for some people and not others."

"Can I borrow other peoples' magic, so they can rest for me while I'm working and it counts?"

"...there is, actually, a way to do that, but I don't know how."

"Oh, good. I'll figure it out."

"It might be dangerous, I don't know. I'm hoping it'll shake out as an obvious principle once I've done more work."

"What work are you doing?"

She holds up her list of planned experiments. "I'm going to play with swapping around material components and somatics and verbals, and then some of the more conceptual pieces of the spells, and - see what happens."

He giggles. "Don't die. Mandos might tell you to find a safer hobby."

"Iiii might get hurt, if I discover that swapping something makes my acid spell and my armor spell swap how they aim, or something, but I don't have anything that deals out enough damage that I'd actually die unless I was fantastically unlucky. Maybe I should do my practice in Lorien? Since it's supposed to be healing there? What does one do if they break their leg or get burned on a cooking fire, here, I should have asked this a while ago, I'm so used to clerics."