Makes sense. I'd go get him something myself but I am trapped by a child who requires snuggling.

He comes in a while later with a tray that's been stuffed with eclectic Tirion delicacies. Hello, you two.

Hi! Mmm, food. She takes some.

Fëanáro does too, but distractedly, still writing.

As long as it get swallowed. What are all these foods? I should probably learn that sort of thing so I can remember what I liked best.

They are both quite happy to teach her the Quenya names for everything.

Her pronunciation is mediocre! But she scribbles down transliterations along with descriptive phrases like "artichokey thing" and "the sweet puff jobbie".

This delights Fëanáro, who wants to know what she's writing for everything.

She laughs and tells him. This is a good introduction to placeholder vague nouns; not only "jobbie" but also "thingy" and "whatsit" appear on her list.

Quenya doesn't have those, a shortcoming which horrifies both Rúmil and Fëanáro; they start proposing some and saying them aloud to evaluate sounds.

...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?"