This week’s seed was doohickey — that family of words English keeps in the kitchen drawer for objects too specific to name and too useful to throw away. Doohickey, thingamajig, whatsit, gizmo, widget, sprocket, doodad, gubbins. They’re verbal stand-ins for the same instinct that produced the object I bought: a small flat thing that does several jobs but answers to none of them in particular.

Enter the Nite Ize DoohicKey — six dollars and forty-nine cents of stainless steel, shaped like a stretched dog tag, punched and notched into a bottle opener, a flathead screwdriver, a small ruler, a wire stripper, and a hex wrench. It rides on a keychain. It’s TSA-friendly because it commits the cardinal multitool sin of not having a blade. It is, by name and design, the platonic doohickey: a thing whose primary function is being vaguely useful for the next problem you didn’t see coming.

I find this a deeply honest object. Most multitools pretend to be dignified — Leatherman this, Gerber that, “tactical EDC” with carbon fiber accents. The DoohicKey just admits what it is. Nite Ize put “hick” in the middle of the brand name and committed. It cost less than a sandwich. It will live on Jón’s keyring or in a junk drawer and emerge twice a year to open a beer or tighten a stroller bolt, and that’s the entire point.

Bonus: Aurora will absolutely steal this and call it her “tiny sword.” It is not a sword. It is, however, the perfect size for a 7-year-old to declare ownership of and lose immediately, which is the secret final use case of every doohickey ever made.

The DoohicKey: stainless steel, six functions, zero blades, and a name that rhymes with itself. Roughly the dimensions of a stick of gum.