When the British entrepreneur Kevin Ashton was searching, in 1999, for a term to describe a network of computers with their own means of gathering information and understanding the world, he didn't resort to a noun pileup like "Object Connectivity Matrix." He didn't coin a cute word like "Sensorius." Instead, he gave this dawning phenomenon a name that incorporates one of the oldest words in the English language. He called it the Internet of Things.
Today, all kinds of things are in the Internet of Things: pacemakers, thermostats, roadways, refrigerators, electrical meters, wristwatches — even garbage cans. That's the unique genius of thing: It can mean, well, anything.
And Internet of Things (often abbreviated as IoT) is just one example of thing's elastic nature. In fact, thing keeps reinventing itself in all sorts of novel ways — in titles, product names, colloquial idioms, and slogans.
It can even be the name of a fictional character… or two.
Or three.
Thing made its first appearance in Old English sometime around the seventh century C.E. It originally signified a meeting or assembly, a meaning still retained in Iceland's Althing, or parliament (the word translates literally to "general assembly"); or a matter brought up in a court of law. (Latin res, which means "thing," is still used in legal parlance. And Old English thing is preserved in the second element of hustings, used today in political jargon to mean "the campaign trail" but originally signifying "house assembly.") Over the centuries, thing came also to mean an verbal expression ("I never heard a better thing"), a thought or idea ("Don't think such things"), the notable point ("The thing is..."), a material object ("a little wooden thing"), property or wealth ("She packed up all her things"), and the genitals. (Chaucer, writing around 1395, may have been to first to use "thynge" in that final sense, in the Wife of Bath's Tale.) In all, the OED gives 16 principal definitions for thing as well as many derivatives: thingamabob (first documented in 1757), thingy (1787), thinglike (1805), thingamajig (1824), and thingism (1935). (Borrowed from French choisisme, thingism is "a particular concern with material objects.")
Thing frequently stands in for or "some item I can't quite recall the name of." In The Writing Problems of Visual Thinkers, Gerald Grow observes that the overuse of thing is a habit of many people who write poorly:
Words have such little relevance to visual thinkers that they often do not even name the things they talk and write about. They use vague terms like it, this, that, and thing, along with vague pronoun references[.]
A limited vocabulary — intentional in this case — explains the title of the best-selling 2015 picture book by Randall Munroe (best known as the creator of the xkcd webcomic): Thing Explainer. To explain "complicated stuff in simple words," Munroe challenged himself to use only the 1,000 — or "ten hundred" — most common English words in its text. Thing is, by various counts, the sixth, 70th, 118th, or 203rd word on that list, and in Munroe's hands it covers all of the stuff of life, from human cells to cell phones, from volcanoes to skyscrapers.
The things in Munroe's book and in the Internet of Things are benign, but that isn't true of some other things. To see things means "to have hallucinations," and an entity too mysterious or frightening to be described is often called a thing, with a slight shudder. "Things that go bump in the night" — from a line in a traditional Scottish prayer — are unexplained noises, possibly caused by ghosts; the phrase was first published around 1895, but probably goes back much further.
Thing can be trivializing. An anonymous anecdote, reported in Time magazine in 1987, quoted President George H.W. Bush as dismissing a campaign strategy suggestion as "the vision thing." In a 2011 post titled "The Thing Thing," Language Log traced this usage of thing back to a 1906 article in a publication called Skidoo!: "When it comes to that poetry thing he thinks he can make Hank Longfellow beat it up a tree." The novelist Flannery O'Connor, in 1955, spoke disparagingly of "this television thing." (She was eager for it "to be over with.")
Many thing idioms that still sound current are in fact quite old. Poor thing to express pity or condescension for a person goes back to the 1300s. The thing — as in "quite the thing" or "the very thing" — has meant "that which is proper or fashionable" since the 1730s. Do your thing — go your own way, follow your interest — was popularized by hippies in the 1960s but has been around since the 19th century: "But do your thing and I shall know you," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841.
Volkswagen isn't the only business to have capitalized on thing. One of Coca-Cola's most durable slogans was "It's the Real Thing," which was in use from 1969 to 1975 and which was briefly revived in 1990 as "You Can't Beat the Real Thing." There was a public outcry in 2003 when General Electric dropped its ad slogan of 23 years, "We Bring Good Things to Life," in favor of "Imagination at Work." Countless retailers have added an indefinite — or even infinite — gloss to their inventory by adding "Things" to their names: Linens -N- Things, Eggs 'n' Things, Games 'n' Things. According to the U.S. trademark database, within the last 12 months "Internet of Things" has spawned nearly 70 spinoffs, including Internet of Good Things, Internet of Evil Things, Internet of My Things, Internet of Incredible Things, and Internet of Things That Really Matter.
One new thing slogan appropriates an idiom that seems newly coined but is in fact decades old. Earlier this year, the cable channel truTV — which broadcasts, among other programming, some of the games of the NCAA basketball tournament, also known as March Madness — revealed a new, scrawled tagline: "truTV is A Thing." The slogan turns a pop-culture expression into a positive declaration while sounding a bit self-effacing. "We're not the biggest channel on earth," a spokesperson told me via Twitter. Rather, he said, truTV is modestly asserting that "we exist."
"It's a thing" and "Is that even a thing?" are trendy right now. But as Patricia O'Connor pointed out last year in her Grammarphobia blog, versions of the phrase have been around since at least the mid-1980s. She found an example in a 1984 issue of Musician magazine:
In the article, Garry Tallent, the bassist for the E Street Band, comments on a People magazine piece that compared the "clean-living" band to the Hardy Boys.
"It's true," Tallent is quoted as saying, "but, especially since People magazine, it's become a thing."
And linguist Mark Lieberman, writing in Language Log earlier this year, found an example from a letter dated 1783 — two centuries earlier. Here's the pertinent passage:
If any body could be thoroughly convinced that a prediction of winds is a thing and possible and real, then to such a person a proper classification of them would be useful.
Lieberman comments:
This citation suggests that the "is a thing"; usage has always been Out There in platonic Idiom World, and may have been incarnated many times through history before it finally caught the memetic brass ring.
All it took was for someone — say, truTV — to append a hashtag to make the phrase seem like the in thing, the next new thing, and a thing to be reckoned with.
