Metasyntactic Variable
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A Metasyntactic Variable -- also called a "Placeholder Name" -- is a word or phrase used in the place of another word or phrase in any of several contexts. By mathematical analogy, this is the linguistic equivalent of letters that are used as variables for numbers in algebra, calculus and the like. These are words that functional grammatically as nouns and that can refer to objects, places or people whose names do not exist, are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown in the context in which they are being discussed. This can include such terms as "watchamacallit", "thingamabob", "dojiggy" and "wossname" (the latter being primarily a UK usage), or a term as simple as "thing". Most of these words and usages can be documented to at least the 19th century, but no doubt date back much further.
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 Internet Engineering Task Force 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 at the Coding Horror blog.
Some fields have their own specific placeholder terminology. For example, "widget"[2] 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 ALGOL 68 in the late 1960s, with its first appearance in print being the hyphenated construction "meta-syntactic variable" found in 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.
Advertising
- "Brand X" is used in television advertisements as a generic brand representing any other brand than the one being advertised.
Fan Works
- Can be found in play twice in the title of the Harry Potter/Doctor Who Crossover fic Potter Who and the Wossname's Thingummy.
Film
- Fictional brands such as 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.
- "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.
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 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 quote page.
- A parrot in Eric also cites the concept by name in an amusingly recursive and self-referential manner:
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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. |
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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 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 a page listing uses of this name.
- "Heisler Beer" often comes in 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:
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... apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind, |
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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. foocubi and werefoo).
- One of the (many, many) monsters in Godville is the "Watchamacallit".
Web Comics
- The Perry Bible Fellowship introduced Skub. Which is often used as "generic subject of a Flame War, that in itself is of little importance to those not involved".
Web Original
- The Jargon File has an 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. They symbolize.").
- This spawned derivatives, such as "shushpanzer" (шушпанцер), which means more or less "armored vehicle that looks weird or improvised and obviously doesn't fit well into classifications", "shushpancycle" ("шушпанцикл", the same for motorcycles and other small wheeled vehicles) and "shushpangewehr" ("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, 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 Python.
- The 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 unexplained phenomenon, with "X" representing the unknown, as in algebra.
- It is common to use the name "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 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 "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 "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 '"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.'
- ↑ Quux.
- ↑ Not to be confused with our usage of the term