I often find myself needing families of nonsense words. A friend uses foo, boo, hoo, goo, etc. I tend to use fwoing, boing, going, doing, etc., or sometimes boink, doink, etc. I went through a bubbly phase -- gobble, bobble, obble, wibble, blibble. When really pressed for time, I often drop back to xx, xxx, yyy, or even a, b, x. When feeling creative, I'll try to think of random, unrelated English words: closet, ribbed, petunia, garlic, fish. ('fish' works surprisingly well.) I used to use Star Control II alien races: pkunk, spathi, utwig, supox, VUX. Once I tried using emotions -- hate, fear, happiness, joy, anger, loathing -- but they were too distracting.

I have also found that it is useful to have your own vocabulary of nonsense words, so you can recognize your stuff. If I find die if ++$fwoing > 42, I know somebody cut & paste my code. It's also good when running across random files littering a file system. It helps to know whether you're supposed to recognize what something is. If it's named foo, anybody could have created it, but if it's gronk, I know exactly whose it is (I only know one friend who uses that one.)

In reply to Re: What's your favourite non-word? by sfink
in thread What's your favourite non-word? by George_Sherston

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.