Clicker? Doofer? Thingamajig? Choose your fighter – we’re just simply not accepting remote
Establishing a finely curated idiolect and set of personal terminology – unique to you and maybe a few mates or members of your family – is a fundamental part of what it means to be British.
Forget what people up north call a barm versus what they call it down south, that’s played out: we want get into your homes—your heads, even, and find out what only you and yours call stuff that has no need for renaming. The latest debate we’ve come across is what do you call the remote control?
This sort of stuff is always peculiar as, technically, we’ve just given you the only answer that should count: it’s called a remote. And yet for so many people, it’s not. Digging around on social, we’ve come across some familiar names and some not so familiar.
Whilst we saw many revert to the classic ‘flicker’ or ‘clicker’, there was a fair section of people who championed the phrase ‘doofer’ (I for one, am in that category). However, stop us if you’ve heard any of these used in common/colloquial parlance before.
One commenter revealed that they called it, “The Zapper mostly but sometimes the remote”, another “The blipper”, and one person simply wrote: “anyone know where ‘the buttons’ are…..!”. Then one bloke had to go and ruin the fun by just putting, “It’s a remote, not a zapper. It remotely controls the tv”. Alright, buzzkill.
In fairness, they were still plenty of normal suggestions: ‘thingy’, ‘thingamajig’, ‘thingamabob’—all the ‘thingys’; ‘doodar/doodah’, even just “the control”; but we draw the line at Bernadette’s “mum’s husband used to call it the indicator”. Indicator? You’re not signalling to hook a left towards the kitchen, you’re controlling the telly, mate.
However, after putting it to our own team, we found the undisputed king of kooky names for a TV remote in our very midst. Ladies and gentleman, please promise us you will never refer to the remote as “The Zeeber”. We genuinely don’t even know where to start with that one. You know who you are.
