Metasyntactic thingies

[Ben Finney]

Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> writes:

> But what placeholder names do you use for functions, methods or other
> actions? As in, placeholder verbs rather than nouns?

I find Lewis Carroll's canon to be a rich source of pronounceable
nonsense words. The poem Jabberwocky is particularly valuable
<URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky#Lexicon>.

The trouble with doesn't-mean-anything words is that they quickly
*acquire* meaning. Many of the words that were unknown before
Jabberwocky have since entered the English language as accepted standard
words.

This is going on all the time. The term “widget” was once a deliberately
abstract unit of manufacture, a metasyntactic word for discussion of
economics deliberately chosen because it had no concrete meaning. It has
since gained concrete meaning, and would be too confusing to use it
today without disambiguating <URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget>.

Another good example is the word “goon”. In the early 20th century, the
word was not widespread enough to have a fixed, determined meaning
<URL:https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/goon>, and the Popeye cartoon used
it as a name for a strange grotesque giant in 1933. That word, perhaps
more than the character, inspired the title of The Goon Show in the
1950s <URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goon_Show>. Simultaneously,
the word was *also* used to mean a hired thug.

Words were so freely appropriated and gleefully mangled to surreal
effect in The Goon Show that it, too, is a rich source of such
semi-comprehensible words, good for use as metasyntactic tokens.

So all told, English is particularly prone to have seeming nonsense
words enter common use and people *apply* one or more meanings; the
metasyntactic usage is thus undermined. So it goes.

> Aside from such boring ones as "do_work" and similar, the only
> placeholder verb I can think of is frobnicate.
>
> Does anyone else have any?

I tend to riff on Latinate word constructions in the same vein as
“frobnicate”. I also try to channel The Goon Show when I need a
metasyntactic word. Some recent ones include “spunge”, “nardle”, “crun”,
etc.

-- 
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Ben Finney