Episode: 3736
Title: HPR3736: Metasyntactic words
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3736/hpr3736.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:48:17

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,736 from Monday the 28th of November 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Meetis Intactic Words.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, blah, blah, blah, literally.
Hey everybody, this is Klaatu.
I want to talk about metacentactic words.
Metacentactic words are words like, foo, bar, bass, blah, things like that.
They're vocables.
They're sounds that we make to take the place of something specific.
I realized, when I was speaking at one point to someone, I realized that I used metacentactic vocals, words, whatever.
Fairly often, and I kind of started to admire them for what part they played in a linguistic structure or relationship that I have with a lot of different people.
This is sort of in praise of metacentactic words.
I think that it's a useful construct.
I've got three different ways that they're useful.
This isn't revolutionary.
These are the ways people use them, but I think it's interesting to categorize.
First of all, they're useful in overviews.
Because sometimes you want to explain a concept or a process without distracting people with specifics.
You just want to describe a general process first so that your audience has expectation of what they're about to get from you when you start delving into the specifics.
For instance, you could imagine someone giving a little bit of a talk, such as the general and usual process is you type in some command, dnf install, blah, and then start and enable the service system control, enable dash, dash, now, blah.
In that little speech there, the word, blah, obviously, takes the place of lots of different things, and that's the advantage of it.
That sequence of events, the install, and then the starting of a service, if you're a cis admin or a frequent Linux user or whatever, then that's a very familiar sequence.
It does take time to get that sequence instilled in your brain.
You learn the install process, maybe, and then you forget that after you install it, you have to start the service, or maybe you've got experience on one Linux distribution that auto starts things for you, whether you want it to or not.
And then you go to a maybe arguably a more sensible distribution that doesn't do something like that, and you realize, oh yeah, I have to start the service, I have to do that.
So getting that sequence down is important, and it doesn't matter what blah is in that scenario, the important information is dnf install system, cuddle, system control, enable dash, dash, now, or start if you prefer, whatever the sequence is for you.
That's the important part, and so you're alerting your listeners, hey, don't listen to blah, forget that part, think about this thing instead, these commands, these specific things, in this order, that's what I want you to remember from this discussion.
Another way that they're useful is when you want to abstract something, so you want to describe a specific thing to somebody, and yet you don't want to insist on what that specific thing is, I feel like this is more common than the examples I could think of.
I could only think of one example, but I know I've done this before, so a lot more than just in this exact case, but the example I've got for that is blah install get cola, or yeah, I guess I think I prefer blah for that, blah install get cola.
So what that's saying really is, we're all friends here, we know Linux, you know how to install an application, it's probably either apt, or dnf, and then the word install, and then get dash cola.
So the important part here is the install get cola, not the fiddly part of what does your distribution use to install a package caveat, of course, there are more package managers than just apt and dnf, I'm aware of that, I'm just using that as a simple example for when you might want to abstract something.
I think it's based on your audience, if you are speaking to an audience that knows a lot of different options, and you just want to convey, hey, we're going to use your network, your network monitoring tool of choice in order to get this results.
All we care about is the result, so we don't care for using blah, we don't care what we're using, so I'll just say using blah network monitor, we get a collection of this a dump of this TCP traffic, or you know, whatever.
So abstraction, and then finally, sometimes you just need a placeholder text or phrase, so it's when you can't think of a word, so you just need, you need something send an email to blah at example.com, I mean, this is kind of in a way a medicine tactic to double header, because blah is a medicine tactic in this, and certainly, and then example is in this context of medicine tactic, because we know that example.com is a purposefully.
It does exist, but a non-active, a safe domain to use in, well, examples, so this is kind of both, but I mean, it could be whatever, you know, you could tell people to type a phrase, but you can't think of the phrase, so you say blah, blah, blah, blah.
But beautiful technique, now sometimes medicine tactic words are not useful, and I think it's important not to get caught out when, when using them.
And again, it's entirely depending on your audience, and I think that's the fascinating thing about this is that, that this is about a relationship, it's about who you're speaking with, and what you can actually safely assume, they are comfortable with abstracting or making into a variable.
So sometimes medicine tactic words I think can be distracting to certain people, for instance, let's say someone asks you outright, how do you install Apache on this system?
Oh, you just type DNF install blah, wait a minute, that's only like half of the information that was asked for. Maybe they knew the part that said DNF install, maybe that was the part that they knew what they were asking is, what's the name of the Apache package on this system?
Is it Apache 2? Is it HTTPD? Is it Apache 2-HTTPD? Like what do I type in? And you've just told them DNF installed part that they knew, blah, the part that they didn't know, that's not useful.
They can also be, so that's distracting, they can also be, is that distracting? Maybe that's not distracting, maybe that's the wrong term, maybe that is inappropriate, or I guess that is confusing as well.
So that's confusing, I think sometimes they can be distracting as well. So if you are speaking to someone, and you're throwing around medicine tactic words, and your audience is not familiar with the concept of medicine tactic words,
then you need to choose your medicine tactic words fairly carefully. In my experience, in the circles that I've happened to have spoken to, the word blah, BLAH, as beautiful as it is, tends to be pretty recognizable as nonsense word,
whereas word, like the word FU, and certainly BAR, and even BAS, like that doesn't always go over as smoothly as I expect it to. And I've kind of, in a way, if I'm not sure of my audience, I've kind of gotten away from a lot of FU, BAR, BAS.
I mean, that's not to say I don't use them, because I use them all the time. But if the audience is, if I'm not 100% comfortable with that audience's knowledge base, then I do tend to find that I have better success with BLAH, or just the literal term example, that tends to work better in my experience.
I think sometimes throwing out a word that people don't expect, like FU, BAR, BAS, they don't immediately understand that that's a word that they are meant to treat as a fake word, as a placeholder.
And you can, like certainly, I mean, that's sort of like catching people off guard, but it can also just deeply confuse someone who may kind of know that medicine tactic words exist, and just aren't quite sure how far it goes.
And so if you're telling a new Linux user, for instance, oh, just type of type in DNF install FU, like sometimes that sounds like a thing that they're supposed to type in.
Like, okay, here I go, DNF install F-O-O or FU, and then you're like, oh no, no, I didn't mean literally type in the word FU, I meant whatever you're trying to type in.
You know, like that, it falls apart then. And again, in my experience, which is just my experience, but in my experience, BLAH seems to very rarely confuse people.
Examples as well, but it's harder to say example when you're speaking, I find, like just DNF install example, that's weird, whereas in writing, that does tend to come across, I think, okay.
So, medicine tactic words, they're really useful, they're interesting little linguistic, unique things.
No wind to use them, and I think, no wind not to use them, and then always really kind of analyze for yourself, your audience, who you're speaking to.
What's their comfort level with medicine tactic words? Like, is that a concept that they understand? If it is, is there a specific set of words that they would be familiar with, or a specific set of words that would completely throw them for a loop?
It's kind of an interesting exercise, and I think if you, if you give it a moment of thought, and it, because it's not really, it's not something that I generally think about before speaking to a group of people, I don't, I don't sit down, and, and look, look their names up on, on the internet, and try to figure out who they are, and what kind of words they would be familiar with, it's not like that.
It's just, you kind of read the room, you look at who you think you're talking to, you might be wrong, because you're just looking at a bunch of people, but make some kind of assessment, and then make, make the call based on what you believe to be true.
And then as you proceed, if it turns out that, yeah, they do actually seem to be pretty comfortable with this concept of abstracting words away from what I actually mean.
Well, let's go a little bit further, I'll just start using food and bar and bars and other weird terms like that, until I get a blank stare, and then I know I've gone too far, I'll clarify, and then I know my, I, I can level set.
There you go, that's my, my thoughts on medicine tactic wording. Hopefully this was interesting to you, thanks for listening, talk to you next time.
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