JOLLY DAYS

Don't Wibble Me

Wikipedia took a hammering recently for inaccuracy, but for me, it is just a great resource. You have to take any source of information with a grain of salt, but wikipedia ain't nothing.

I've always wondered where foobar came from — the programmer placeholder you run across in discussions of Filemaker Pro calculations and all sorts of CSS and HTML examples. The wikipedia article about foobar led to an even more interesting discussion about this type of placeholder text, which has the fancy-dancy designation “metasyntactic variable” :

A metasyntactic variable is either a placeholder name (a kind of alias term, commonly used to denote the subject matter under discussion), or a random member of a class of things under discussion. The term originates from computer programming and other technical contexts, and is commonly used in examples by hackers and programmers.

Here is a fascinating discussion of the placeholder “wibble” :

First recorded in the 1840s alongside wobble, wibble rose to prominence after it was used as a nonsense word in the Roger Irrelevant cartoon strip in UK adult comic Viz in the 1980s and later used in an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth in 1989. The term is also used as a synonym for chatter and other contentless remarks, and (rarely) as a way of pronouncing “www”.

Wibble has also become something of an internet simming phenomena, with various websites dedicated to the so-called “cult of wibble”. The word gained immense popularity when Dr. Samuel Ramsden used it as his trademark sign-off on posts within the Section 47 Star Trek forums community from 2000 onwards. It was quickly adopted by other members of the site and spread to other Trek rpgs. Ramsden was later said to regret creating this particular application of the word, as it had gone out of control, and become more of an irritant than a humorous mark of respect for the net simming legend.