Placeholder name

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Placeholder name on a website Contact-new.svg
Placeholder name on a website

Placeholder names are intentionally overly generic and ambiguous terms referring to things, places, or people, the names of which or of whom do not actually exist; are temporarily forgotten, or are unimportant; or in order to avoid stigmatization, or because they are unknowable and/or unpredictable given the context of their discussion; to de-emphasize in which event the precise specification thereof is otherwise impossible, or to deliberately expunge. [1]

Contents

Placeholder names for people are often terms referring to an average person or a predicted persona of a typical user.

Linguistic role

These placeholders typically function grammatically as nouns and can be used for people (e.g. John Doe, Jane Doe ), objects (e.g. widget ), locations ("Main Street"), or places (e.g. Anytown, USA). They share a property with pronouns because their referents must be supplied by context; but, unlike a pronoun, they may be used with no referent—the important part of the communication is not the thing nominally referred to by the placeholder, but the context in which the placeholder occurs.

In their Dictionary of American Slang (1960), Stuart Berg Flexner and Harold Wentworth use the term kadigan for placeholder words. They define "kadigan" as a synonym for thingamajig. The term may have originated with Willard R. Espy, though others, such as David Annis, also used it (or cadigans) in their writing. Its etymology is obscure—Flexner and Wentworth related it to the generic word gin for engine (as in the cotton gin ). It may also relate to the Irish surname Cadigan.

Hypernyms (words for generic categories, such as "flower" for tulips and roses) may also be used in this function of a placeholder, but they are not considered to be kadigans.

Examples

Placeholder words exist in a highly informal register of the English language. In formal speech and writing, words like accessory, paraphernalia, artifact , instrument , or utensil are preferred; these words serve substantially the same function, but differ in connotation.

Most of these words can be documented in at least the 19th century. 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. In Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado , W. S. Gilbert makes the Lord High Executioner sing of a "little list" which includes:

... 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.

Some fields have their own specific placeholder terminology. For example, "widget" in economics, engineering and electronics, or "Blackacre" and "John Doe" or "Jane Doe" in law. "X-ray" was originally a placeholder name for an unexplained phenomenon.

Companies and organizations

Computing

Placeholder names are commonly used in computing:

Domain names

Certain domain names in the format example .tld (such as example.com, example.net, and example.org) are officially reserved as placeholders for the purpose of presentation. [4] Various example reserved IP addresses exist in IPv4 and IPv6, such as 192.0.2.0 in IPv4 documentation and 2001:db8:: in IPv6 documentation.

Geographical locations

Placeholders such as Main Street, Your County, and Anytown are often used in sample mailing addresses. Ruritania is commonly used as a placeholder country. Acacia Avenue has been used as shorthand for an average suburban residential street in Britain.

Something -stan and its demonym something-stani, where something is often profanity, is commonly used as a placeholder for a Middle Eastern or South Asian country/people or for a politically disliked portion of one's own country/people. For example, Londonistan , to evoke the perception of London's high Muslim population. [5]

Timbuktu , which is also a real city in the country of Mali, is often used to mean a place that is far away, in the middle of nowhere, or exotic.

Podunk is used in American English for a hypothetical small town regarded as typically dull or insignificant, a place in the U.S. that is unlikely to have been heard of. Another example is East Cupcake to refer to a generic small town in the Midwestern United States. [6]

Similarly, the boondocks or the boonies are used in American English to refer to very rural areas without many inhabitants.

In New Zealand English, Woop Woops (or, alternatively, Wop-wops) [7] is a (generally humorous) name for an out-of-the-way location, usually rural and sparsely populated. The similar Australian English Woop Woop, (or, less frequently, Woop Woops) [7] can refer to any remote location, or outback town or district. Another New Zealand English term with a similar use is Waikikamukau ("Why kick a moo-cow"), a generic name for a small rural town. [8]

In British English, Bongo Bongo Land (or Bongo-bongo Land) is a pejorative term used to refer to Third World countries, particularly in Africa, or to a fictional such country.

Medicine

Military

Often used in example names and addresses to indicate to the serviceman where to put his own details.

Numbers

People

Science

In chemistry, tentative or hypothetical elements are assigned provisional names until their existence is confirmed by IUPAC. Historically, this placeholder name would follow Mendeleev's nomenclature; since the Transfermium wars, however, the consensus has been to assign a systematic element name based on the element's atomic number. [18] Examples of these systems in use would be "ekasilicon" (germanium) and "ununseptium" (tennessine) respectively.

Similarly, the name "unobtainium" is frequently used for a material of highly desired characteristics which does not exist or which would be prohibitively expensive to mine, procure or synthesize.

Spoken and written language

See also

Related Research Articles

A metasyntactic variable is a specific word or set of words identified as a placeholder in computer science and specifically computer programming. These words are commonly found in source code and are intended to be modified or substituted before real-world usage. For example, foo and bar are used in over 330 Internet Engineering Task Force Requests for Comments, the documents which define foundational internet technologies like HTTP (web), TCP/IP, and email protocols.

0 (zero) is a number representing an empty quantity. Adding 0 to any number leaves that number unchanged. In mathematical terminology, 0 is the additive identity of the integers, rational numbers, real numbers, and complex numbers, as well as other algebraic structures. Multiplying any number by 0 has the result 0, and consequently, division by zero has no meaning in arithmetic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Identifier</span> Name that identifies a unique entity

An identifier is a name that identifies either a unique object or a unique class of objects, where the "object" or class may be an idea, physical countable object, or physical noncountable substance. The abbreviation ID often refers to identity, identification, or an identifier. An identifier may be a word, number, letter, symbol, or any combination of those.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Acme Corporation</span> Fictional company featured in Warner Bros. cartoons

The Acme Corporation is a fictional corporation that features prominently in the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote animated shorts as a running gag. The company manufactures outlandish products that fail or backfire catastrophically at the worst possible times. The name is also used as a generic title in many cartoons, especially those made by Warner Bros. and films, TV series, commercials and comic strips.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Doe</span> Common placeholder name in English

John Doe (male) and Jane Doe (female) are multiple-use placeholder names that are used in the United States and the United Kingdom when the true name of a person is unknown or is being intentionally concealed. In the context of law enforcement in the United States, such names are often used to refer to a corpse whose identity is unknown or cannot be confirmed. These names are also often used to refer to a hypothetical "everyman" in other contexts, in a manner similar to John Q. Public or "Joe Public". There are many variants to the above names, including John/Jane Roe, John/Jane Smith, John/Jane Bloggs, and Johnie/Janie Doe or just Baby Doe for children.

In linguistics, a neologism is any relatively recent and isolated term, word, or phrase that nevertheless has achieved popular or institutional recognition, and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered a neologism once it is published in a dictionary.

Waikikamukau is a generic name for a small rural town or locality in New Zealand. New Zealanders use the name as a placeholder name for "any town" or to denote a non-specific but remote rural town. It has a similar connotation to the New Zealand slang Wop Wops and the Australian term Woop Woop and other appellations such as the "Boondocks" or "Timbuktu". The name is a joking reference to the frequency of New Zealand place names starting with "Wai".

Jane may refer to:

Many languages have words expressing indefinite and fictitious numbers—inexact terms of indefinite size, used for comic effect, for exaggeration, as placeholder names, or when precision is unnecessary or undesirable. One technical term for such words is "non-numerical vague quantifier". Such words designed to indicate large quantities can be called "indefinite hyperbolic numerals".

In sociolinguistics, a sociolect is a form of language or a set of lexical items used by a socioeconomic class, profession, an age group, or other social group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Q. Public</span> Placeholder name for a hypothetical person

John Q. Public is a generic name and placeholder name, especially in American English, to denote a hypothetical member of society, deemed a "common man", who is presumed to represent the randomly selected "man on the street".

I-names are one form of an XRI — an OASIS open standard for digital identifiers designed for sharing resources and data across domains and applications. I-names are human readable XRIs intended to be as easy as possible for people to remember and use. For example, a personal i-name could be =Mary or =Mary.Jones. An organizational i-name could be @Acme or @Acme.Corporation.

The phrase "Tom, Dick, and Harry" is a placeholder for unspecified people. The phrase most commonly occurs as "every Tom, Dick, and Harry", meaning everyone, and "any Tom, Dick, or Harry", meaning anyone, although Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines the term to specify "a set of nobodies; persons of no note".

Mister Smith is a term used for male persons whose surname is Smith.

This Comparison of programming languages (associative arrays) compares the features of associative array data structures or array-lookup processing for over 40 computer programming languages.

In computer slang, J. Random Hacker is an arbitrary programmer (hacker).

A mythical figure like the Unknown Soldier; the archetypal hacker nerd. This term is one of the oldest in the hacker's jargon, apparently going back to MIT in the 1960s. may originally have been inspired by 'J. Fred Muggs', a show-biz chimpanzee whose name was a household word back in the early days of TMRC, and was probably influenced by 'J. Presper Eckert' ".

Dick is a common English slang word for the human penis. It is also used by extension for a variety of slang purposes, generally considered vulgar, including: as a verb to describe sexual activity; and as a pejorative term for individuals who are considered to be rude, abrasive, inconsiderate, or otherwise contemptible. In this context, it can be used interchangeably with jerk, and can also be used as a verb to describe rude or deceitful actions. Variants include dickhead, which literally refers to the glans. The offensiveness of the word dick is complicated by the continued use of the word in inoffensive contexts, including as both a given name and a surname, the popular British dessert spotted dick, the classic novel Moby-Dick, the Dick and Jane series of children's books, and the American retailer Dick's Sporting Goods. Uses such as these have provided a basis for comedy writers to exploit this juxtaposition through double entendre.

Citizen X or CitizenX may refer to:

References

  1. thingummy, n., Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  2. Raymond, Eric. "Foo". The Jargon File (version 4.4.7). Retrieved September 24, 2018.
  3. "J. Random". Catb.org. Retrieved October 6, 2012.
  4. "Example.com".
  5. Caldwell, Christopher (June 25, 2006), "After Londonistan", The New York Times, retrieved December 12, 2009
  6. Gail Collins (April 30, 2014). "It's Only a Million". New York Times. It will never occur to them that if voters had not given them that stint of public service, they would be processing divorce cases back home in East Cupcake.
  7. 1 2 "Woop Woop". Oxford Dictionaries. Archived from the original on September 28, 2016.
  8. McCloy, Nicola (2006). Whykickamoocow: Curious New Zealand Place Names. New Zealand: Random House. ISBN   1-86941-807-7.
  9. Waterman, Shaun (October 24, 2005). "Military interpreter 'used false identity'". UPI Security & Terrorism. Retrieved March 9, 2022.
  10. Makeig, John (December 28, 1991). "Mute suspect nabbed, but identity still at large". Houston Chronicle. p. 29.
  11. Nash, Bruce M.; et al. (2001). The New Lawyer's Wit and Wisdom. Running Press. p. 199. ISBN   0762410639 . Retrieved January 19, 2008.
  12. "Médecine légale: X Ben X, l'énigme du cadavre anonyme". L'Economiste (in French). September 23, 2016. Retrieved October 9, 2023.
  13. "حملة أمنية تحصي المتشردين و المتسولين لتحديد هوياتهم !" [A security campaign counts the homeless and beggars to determine their identities!]. Rue20 (in Arabic). April 8, 2019. Retrieved October 9, 2023.
  14. Elhor, Aziz (February 17, 2012). "حقائق صادمة عن أطفال يحملون اسم «X بن X»" [Facts about children named "X Ben X"]. al-Massae. Retrieved October 9, 2023.
  15. "GNYHA Naming Conventions" (PDF).
  16. "Terminal Lance #114 'Myths and Legends IV'". Terminal Lance. March 18, 2011.
  17. "Telephone numbers for drama use (TV, Radio etc)" . Retrieved December 10, 2014.
  18. "Recommendations for the Naming of Elements of Atomic Numbers Greater than 100". IUPAC. Retrieved February 1, 2024.