Placeholder name

Placeholder names are words that can refer to objects or people whose names are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown in the context in which they are being discussed.

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.

Stuart Berg Flexner and Harold Wentworth's Dictionary of American Slang (1960) 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; e.g. "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. Borrowed from French is je ne sais quoi ("I know not what").

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 or Jane Doe in law. "X-ray" was originally a placeholder name for an unexplained phenomenon.

Astronomy

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.[2] Various example reserved IP addresses exist in IPv4 and IPv6, such as 2001:db8: in IP6 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.

Something-stan, where something is often a curse word, is commonly used as a placeholder for a Middle Eastern or South Asian country or for a politically disliked portion of one's own country.

Timbuktu, which happens to be a real city, is often used to mean a place that is far away, in the middle of nowhere, and/or exotic.

Podunk is used in American English for a hypothetical small town regarded as typically dull or insignificant, a place that you have likely never heard of, though still in the United States.

In Australian English, Woop-Woop is the placeholder name for an out of the way town.[3]

Living things

Medicine

Military

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

Numbers

Objects

People

Religion and philosophy

Science fiction

Seldom or never

There are many idioms in many languages which use a noun phrase to designate a long time or never: "a month of Sundays", "the twelfth of never", "the Greek calends".

Spoken and written language

See also

References

  1. "J. Random". Catb.org. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
  2. "Example.com".
  3. "Woop Woop - definition of Woop Woop in English - Oxford Dictionaries".
  4. See Philip Henre Gosse, Letters from Alabama (1859), p. 234:
    The propriety of correct classification was impressed on me during my examination. I inadvertently spoke of it [an opossum] as "a singular creature;" but creature, or rather "critter," is much too honourable a term for such an animal, being appropriated to cattle. The overseer promptly corrected my mistake. "A 'Possum, Sir, is not a critter, but a varmint."
  5. "Terminal Lance #114 “Myths and Legends IV”". 18 March 2011.
  6. "Telephone numbers for drama use (TV, Radio etc)". Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  7. "Franquin - Une oeuvre - Les amis - Peyo".
  • Espy, W., An Almanac of Words at Play (Clarkson Potter, 1979) ISBN 0-517-52090-7
  • Flexner, S. B. and Wentworth, H., A Dictionary of American Slang; (Macmillan, 1960) ASIN B000LV7HQS OCLC 875372335
  • Watson, Ian, "Meet John Doe: stand-ins", section 3.7 in IanWatson.org, Cognitive Design, (Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 2005).
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