Category talk:Metasyntactic words

Why the term "metasyntactic"? I can sort of see an analogy with "metasyntactic variables", but the best guess as to the etymology of that term is that it was mainly used because it sounded cool. Mind you, I can't think of anything better at the moment. -dmh 17:12, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * Yes that's where I got it from. A couple of years ago I started compiling a list of these words for Everything2 and asked a resident linguist if there was a name for them. He couldn't think of one so I chose the best-fitting term I'd come across. As you see in the category article, Wikipedia uses "cadigan" right now but that has no better historical standing. &mdash; Hippietrail 23:53, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Are they not simply a type of pronoun? --Surturz 00:48, 27 June 2006 (UTC)


 * In fact, I would say they are quite definitely colloquial indefinite pronouns --Surturz 00:52, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

How does "foobar" or "FUBAR" fit this definition? --Tormod 13:12, 13 Oct 2006 (?TC)

Deletion debate
Tagged by JackPotte but not listed. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:44, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep DCDuring TALK 22:59, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Care to explain why (for this and the ones below)? --Bequw → ¢ • τ 00:17, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
 * No reason presented for deletion. No information about attention to consequences. DCDuring TALK * Holiday Greetings! 02:03, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
 * From below, this category contains terms with whitespace (eg Tom, Dick or Harry) so for some people's definition of "word" this category name is incorrect. Category:Metasyntactic terms being more general would be more correct. Not sure what consequences you could be referring to. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 18:27, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Broken links mostly, I suppose, since a redirect isn't part of the proposal. DCDuring TALK * Holiday Greetings! 19:23, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete. Move terms to Category:Metasyntactic terms. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 00:18, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete. Tagged at 100% for the reason exposed by Bequw, which was also the purpose of my bot. JackPotte 20:09, 30 December 2009 (UTC)
 * After a bit more thinking, I see more problems.
 * No one else uses the term "metasyntactic" in this sense. People either use kadigan/cadigan or placeholder. I think we should switch to placeholder as that's what wikipedia uses (see w:Category:Placeholder names and Placeholder name).
 * This isn't a topical category (it contains placeholder terms, not terms for/about placeholder terms) so it should read "English ...".
 * Therefore I think Category:English placeholder terms is the best. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 21:20, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Moved to Category:English placeholder terms. Also moved the French and Turkish counterparts. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 03:42, 14 January 2010 (UTC)