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{{Useful Notes|wppage=Metasyntactic variable}}
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|"John Doe"}}
A '''Metasyntactic Variable''' -- also called a '''"
In computing and technology contexts, these words are commonly found in source code and are intended to be modified or substituted before real-world usage. The words '''foo''' and '''bar''' are good examples as they are used in over 330 [[w:Internet Engineering Task Force|Internet Engineering Task Force]] [[w:Request for Comments|Requests for Comments]], the documents which define foundational internet technologies like HTTP (websites), TCP/IP, and email protocols. Metasyntactic variables are used to name entities such as variables, functions, and commands whose exact identity is unimportant and serve only to demonstrate a concept, which is useful for teaching programming. A short examination of Metasyntactic Variables as used in computing can be found [https://blog.codinghorror.com/variable-foo-and-other-programming-oddities/ at the ''Coding Horror'' blog].
Some fields have their own specific placeholder terminology. For example, "widget"<ref>Not to be confused with [[Widget Series|our usage of the term]]</ref> in economics, engineering and electronics, or "Blackacre" and "John Doe" or "Jane Doe" in law.
The term itself has been in use for decades, and originated in the computing community. It appears to have formed spontaneously during the design and discussion of the "metalinguistic" components of the programming language [[w:ALGOL|ALGOL 68]] in the late 1960s, with its first appearance in print being the hyphenated construction "meta-syntactic variable" found in ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=RdlWAAAAMAAJ&q=%22meta%20syntactic%22&dq=%22meta%20syntactic%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwidlorXgMfSAhWF7yYKHZbsBwoQ6AEIMDAE Software 71: proceedings of a conference sponsored by Software World and held at the University of Kent at Canterbury]'' (July 1971). It was probably the result of a fusion of the "metalinguistics" of ALGOL with the earlier phrase "syntactic variable", which had been in use since approximately 1950.
Compare with:
* [[Bland-Name Product]], where the variable is based on a Real Life brand name and the reader or viewer is expected to notice the reference;
* [[The Trope Without a Title]], in which a description (sometimes so vague as to be meaningless) is used instead of a name; and
* [[Buffy-Speak]], where the speaker is making up what sound like metasyntactic variables on the fly because they can't remember (or never knew) the actual terms.
{{examples|suf=s}}
== [[Advertising]] ==
* "[[Brand X]]" is used in television advertisements as a generic brand representing any other brand than the one being advertised.
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== [[Film]] ==
* Fictional brands such as [[W:Morley (cigarette)|Morley]] are often used in film and television as placeholders to avoid unintended [[Product Placement]].
** [[Quentin Tarantino]] appears to prefer using Red Apple cigarettes to Morley cigarettes, though.
* "[[w:Mammoth Studios|Mammoth Studios]]" was a common name for a nonexistent film studio in the 1930s and 1940s (and later in TV series scripts in the 1960s). The name made it through script re-writes on a few occasions.
* [[The Other Wiki]] tells us that "[[Val Verde (fictional country)|Val Verde]] is a fictional country or city used by Hollywood writer and producer Steven E. de Souza when his stories require a South or Central American locale that will not cause legal or diplomatic problems." It first showed up in ''[[Commando (film)|Commando]]'', but has appeared in other works by other writers, including the anime ''[[Symphogear]]''.
== [[Literature]] ==
* [[Edgar Allan Poe]] wrote a short story entitled "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.", showing that particular form to be in familiar use in the United States [[Older Than Radio|in the 1840s]].
* The use of euphemisms like "You-Know-Who" and "Lord Thingy" for Voldemort in the ''[[Harry Potter]]'' books is a very specific application of this trope.
* Invoked by name by Gaspode in the ''[[Discworld]]'' novel ''[[Men at Arms]]'', as seen on the [[Metasyntactic Variable/Quotes|quote page]].
** A parrot in ''[[Eric]]'' also cites the concept by name in an amusingly recursive and self-referential manner:
{{quote|It's a thing, innit? You know, a doodah, a dooberry. you know, tip of my tongue, a wossname. ''Metasyntactic variable.'' Yeah, that's it.}}
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
* The "X" in the title of ''[[The X-Files]]'' is a Metasyntactic Variable referring to the unknown and possibly paranormal aspects of the cases within those files.
** Speaking of ''The X-Files'', the Smoking Man smoked "Morley" cigarettes.
* "Oceanic Airlines" -- most famously seen in ''[[Lost]]'' but [[Older Than They Think|used as early as 1965]] in ''[[Flipper]]'' -- is used as a "placeholder" fictional airline in films, TV programs, and comic books, typically when a plane is involved in a disaster or another event with which actual airlines would prefer not to be associated. [[The Other Wiki]] has [[w:Oceanic Airlines|a page listing uses of this name]].
* "[https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/heisler-beer-fake-tv-brand Heisler Beer]" often comes in [[Grievous Bottley Harm|easily-broken bottles]], depending on which TV show it's being used in.
== [[Theatre]] ==
* In [[Gilbert and Sullivan]]'s ''[[The Mikado]]'', W. S. Gilbert makes the Lord High Executioner sing of a "little list" which includes:
{{quote|''... apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind,''
''Such as: What d'ye call him: Thing'em-bob, and likewise: Never-mind,''
''and 'St: 'st: 'st: and What's-his-name, and also You-know-who:''
''The task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you.''}}
== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[NetHack]]'': "Foo" is a loanword from hacker jargon often used in discussions of this game, typically those involving sets of creatures with similar characteristics (e.g. [[Horny Devils|foocubi]] and [[Our Werebeasts Are Different|werefoo]]).
* One of the (many, many) monsters in ''[[Godville]]'' is the "Watchamacallit".
== [[Web Comics]] ==
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* The ''[[Jargon File]]'' has an [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/metasyntactic-variable.html extensive entry] on the subject that documents not just American and British usage but terms used by programmers from continental Europe and New Zealand.
* The Russian FIDO community Kaschenko came up with "Shooshpanchik", which was a meme spontaneously evolved from a taunt to one user (who in the end apparently was proud of it). Shooshpanchik is a subset of living creatures, but does not have a more specific meaning. Typically it was used to mutate jokes (e.g. "Hedgehog is an ancient and chthonic animal" could be transformed into "Shooshpanchik is an ancient and metasyntactic animal") or as a substitute "classification" for something made up (one short scene from the ''[[Star Wars]]'' prequels was summarized as "Two shooshpanchiks graze near the spaceship. Male one and female one. [[
** This spawned derivatives, such as "shushpanzer" (шушпанцер), which means more or less "[https://shushpanzer-ru.livejournal.com/ armored vehicle that looks weird or improvised and obviously doesn't fit well into classifications]", "shushpancycle" ("[https://shushpanzer-ru.livejournal.com/tag/%D1%88%D1%83%D1%88%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BB шушпанцикл]", the same for motorcycles and other small wheeled vehicles) and "shushpangewehr" ("[https://web.archive.org/web/20210320030021/https://mpopenker.livejournal.com/tag/%D1%88%D1%83%D1%88%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B8%D1%8F шушпангевер]", the same for firearms, especially long arms).
* All The Tropes (and [[TV Tropes]] before us) has a history of using the word "trope" as a Metasyntactic Variable in trope names, such as [[The Trope Kid]], [[Disney Owns This Trope]] and [[The Von Trope Family]]. TVT began discouraging this practice long before the fork leading to ATT took place, and many such names were later replaced, but we still have a dozen or so lurking about, and have even added a couple of our own, such as [[Tropacabana]].
** We also have the trope [[Foo Fu]], where "Foo" is the classic programmer's Metasyntactic Variable, standing for any mundane item or skill which could be used in some awesome, often combat-related, way.
** Trope wikis occasionally use the [[Sdrawkcab Name]] "[[Report Siht]]" instead of John Doe.
==[[Real Life]]==
* Metasyntactic variables used commonly across all programming languages include ''foobar, foo, bar, baz, qux, quux, quuz, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, [[Colossal Cave Adventure|plugh, xyzzy]]'', and ''thud''.
** ''Wibble, wobble, wubble'', and ''flob'' are also used in the UK.
** Japanese programmers commonly use ''hoge'' (ほげ) and ''piyo'' (ぴよ), with other common words and variants being ''fuga'' (ふが), ''hogera'' (ほげら), and ''hogehoge'' (ほげほげ).
** In France, the word ''toto'' is widely used by programmers, with variants ''tata, titi'', and ''tutu'' as related placeholders.
** ''Spam, ham'', and ''eggs'' are the principal metasyntactic variables used in the programming language [[w:Python (programming language)|Python]].
* The [[w:Whatchamacallit (candy)|''Whatchamacallit'' bar]], a chocolate/peanut butter/caramel candy bar introduced by Hershey in 1978, uses a Metasyntactic Variable as its name to emphasize what at the time of its release was a candy bar allegedly radically different from any produced before.
** Hershey also briefly produced a chocolate-peanut butter bar called the ''Thingamajig'', which was available from 2009 to 2012.
** They also introduced a ''Whozeewhatzit'' bar in 2021, with some but not all of the ingredients of a ''Whatchamacallit'' bar.
* "X-ray" was originally a placeholder name for an [[Unknown Phenomenon|unexplained phenomenon]], with "X" representing the unknown, as in algebra
* It is common to use the name "[[Acme Products|ACME]]" in example SQL Databases and as placeholder company-name for the purpose of teaching. The term 'ACME Database' is commonly used to mean a training or example-only set of database data used solely for training or testing. ACME is also commonly used in documentation which shows SQL usage examples, a common practice with in many educational texts as well as technical documentation from companies such as Microsoft and Oracle.
* "Advent corporation" is a term used by lawyers to describe an as yet unnamed corporation, while legal incorporation documents are being prepared.
** The very real [[w:Advent Corporation|Advent Corporation]] (active 1967-1981) got its name when its founder liked the sound of the placeholder.
* Discussions about cryptography - especially cryptographic procedures - usually use the same two names as metasyntactic variables for the sender and recipient of a message: [[Alice and Bob]].
** With Eve as a generic eavesdropper.
* The block of pseudo-Latin text called [[w:Lorem ipsum|"Lorem ipsum"]] after its first two words (employed above as the page quote) has been used by typesetters since at least the 1960s as a placeholder for "real" text, either to demonstrate a sample page layout or to display the appearance of a particular typeface/font.
* Hawaiian Pidgin, Hawaii's English-based Creole, utilizes the word/phrase "Da Kine" as a sort of universal placeholder. It can take the role of any noun, verb, adverb, or adjective, and its meaning usually (but not always) is derived from context or body language. Because no other English dialects contain words that function this way (though [[The Smurfs|"smurf"]] comes close), outsiders often struggle with this, and locals have been known to use it to deliberately confuse and frustrate non-native speakers.
** It's not unheard of for "da kine" to be used several times in the same sentence, each instance having a different meaning from the others. "I went to da kine with da kine fo' get some da kine, but da kine stay so long he got all da kine and we left." (In context, it was "I went to Foodland with Marc to get some ice cream, but the line was so long he got frustrated and we left")
** Scots uses two words with a similar meaning, "Hingway" and "Hingin" - "Hingway" being any noun, proper noun, or verb, and "Hingin" being any present participle or adjective.
** Similarly, in Guyanese creole English, many things are referred to as "ting" (thing), and people may give directions saying "turn suh" (turn so). Usually hand gestures tell what it is they are talking about.
** In Tagalog, the words "kuwan" and "ano" serve a similar purpose, both being roughly equivalent to "that thing"/"the whatchamacallit" when used for that purpose.
* [[The Other Wiki]] tells us that '"[[wikipedia:Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells|Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells]]" is a generic name used in the [[United Kingdom]] for a person with strongly conservative political views who writes letters to newspapers or the BBC in moral outrage.'
----
:If you're offered a free trip on Oceanic Airlines to Val Verde, ''don't go.''
{{reflist}}
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