Horse 368 - Thingo

Whilst thumbing through the dictionary I found that most redundant word in there. The word I was looking at was cadigan which the OED defines as a replacement word for thingamajig.
I had a think for a second and then came to the opinion that cadigan must be a self-defining word. Specifically the word acts as little more than a placeholder rather the place value of a zero in a cardinal number.

Typically placeholders occupy a syntactic space between nouns and pronouns. They typically function grammatically as nouns; their referents, however, must be supplied by context, like pronouns. They serve as placeholders for names of objects that are otherwise unknown or unspecified.

This sounds like an utterly stupid concept doesn't it? But we have so many of these things:

dingus, doodad, doohickey, doover, gadget, geebie, gizmo, thingamabob, thingamajig, thingummy, thingy, whatchamacallit, whatsitsname, widgets, you get the idea...

Then I thought that there must be more cadigans in everyday life. Lo and behold, there are four very common ones. Crap, stuff, junk, and shit are perhaps the most utilitarian cadigans in the English language, and to make matters worse, they're even mass nouns to boot as well.