colloquial names for types?

[Andrew Koenig]

Is there an easy way to determine the colloquial name of an object's
type?  By "colloquial name" I mean the name by which one would refer
to it in casual conversation.  For example, the colloquial type of 3
is "int", not "<type 'int'>", and the colloquial type of a class is
the name of the class, not including the module in which the class is
defined.

I understand that such names can be ambiguous.  However, they are
useful for printing human-readable representations of complicated
data structures.