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16-710: John Smith is a common personal name. It is also commonly used as a placeholder name and pseudonym , and is sometimes used in the United States and the United Kingdom as a term for an average person . Notable people with the name include: Placeholder name 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 or unpredictable given

32-572: A hypothetical case illustrating some legal point. Examples include: M. Rothbard – a former student of von Mises – similarly used the fictional country in his own works. Ruritania has also been used to describe the stereotypical development of nationalism in 19th-century Eastern Europe , by Ernest Gellner in Nations and Nationalism , in a pastiche of the historical narratives of nationalist movements among Poles, Czechs, Serbians, Romanians, etc. In this story, peasant Ruritanians living in

48-420: A material of highly desired characteristics which does not exist or which would be prohibitively expensive to mine, procure or synthesize. Ruritania Hope's setting lent its name to a literary genre involving fictional countries, which is known as Ruritanian romance . Jurists specialising in international law and private international law use Ruritania and other fictional countries when describing

64-450: 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

80-545: A similar use is Waikikamukau ("Why kick a moo-cow"), a generic name for a small rural town. 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. Often used in example names and addresses to indicate to the serviceman where to put his own details. In chemistry, tentative or hypothetical elements are assigned provisional names until their existence

96-460: 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 . Placeholder words exist in a highly informal register of

112-722: Is East Cupcake to refer to a generic small town in the Midwestern United States . 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 ) 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 ) can refer to any remote location, or outback town or district. Another New Zealand English term with

128-498: Is a placeholder name that evokes the perception of London 's high Muslim population. 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

144-476: 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. As an example, Londonistan

160-478: 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. Examples of these systems in use would be "ekasilicon" ( germanium ) and "ununseptium" ( tennessine ) respectively. Similarly, the name " unobtainium " is frequently used for

176-559: The "Empire of Megalomania " developed national consciousness through the elaboration of a Ruritanian high culture by a small group of intellectuals responding to industrialization and labor migration. Author and royal historian Theo Aronson , in his book Crowns in Conflict (1986), used the term to describe the semi-romantic and even tribal-like conditions of the Balkan and Romanian cultures before World War I . Walter Lippmann used

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192-498: 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

208-680: 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 "

224-486: The context of their discussion; or to deliberately expunge direct use of the name. Placeholder names for people are often terms referring to an average person or a predicted persona of a typical user . 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

240-507: The word to describe the stereotype that characterized the vision of international relations during and after the War. Vesna Goldsworthy of Kingston University , in her book Inventing Ruritania: the imperialism of the imagination (Yale University Press, 1998), addresses the question of the impact of the work of novelists and film-makers in shaping international perceptions of the Balkans in

256-738: Was originally a placeholder name for an unexplained phenomenon. Placeholder names are commonly used in computing : 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. 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. Placeholders such as Main Street , Your County , and Anytown are often used in sample mailing addresses. Ruritania

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