Snafu originally stood for situation normal all fouled up (or its more obscene equivalent) but has become a word in its own right. It derives from an actual place in Africa that has come to describe anywhere that is far off. The next word is a stray that needs to be corralled because it has wandered way far away from the herd.Although cattle drives are rare today, roundups still occur on large ranches for the purposes of branding and shipping the cattle off to market. A roundup is the process of gathering the cattle together prior to the cattle drive. Another possiblity is that it derives from the word dough-guts according to. The term derives from the Spanish word 'dogal' 'meaning a short rope used to keep a calf away from its mother during milking' according to. Clearly, placeholders have been around since at least the mid-19th century as is evidenced by Poe's usage and may have even earlier occurrences.Ī dogie is a calf with no mother. states that the earliest known use of thingamabob was in 1750 but gives no citation as to how or where. links thingamabob with thingamajig and traces thingamajig's origins back to the 1870s but states that the ultimate origin is unclear. Poe's work is 'The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.' and first appeared in 1844. Our next dogie to be rounded-up is a word that says is the same as thingummy and means 'a person or thing whose name one has forgotten, does not know, or does not wish to mention.' Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story entitled 'The Literary Life of _, Esq.' as a play on this word.In mathematics and logic, a placeholder functions much more like a hypernym and is defined as 'a symbol in a logical or mathematical expression that can be replaced by the name of any member of specified set' according to WordNet 3.0 by Princeton University.Īccording to, a Buckaroo is a term that describes a cowboy 'from the Great Basin country of northern Nevada, southern Idaho, northeast California and southeastern Oregon.' Their traditional gear is fancier than many other cowboys. Placeholders are not so clearly classified because of their informal and less well-defined nature. Tree, in this case, is the hypernym (superordinate) and pine or fir would be the hyponyms (subordinates) of the class.

For example, the word tree can be used instead of pine or fir. A hypernym is a word used to describe a generic category rather than a specific member of that category. Placeholders are part of informal English and differ from hypernyms, although hypernyms can be placeholders. The context itself can identify the placeholder. But, unlike pronouns, what they refer to need not be specifically identified in the context. Placeholders or placeholder names usually operate as nouns and have properties much like pronouns because they refer to something else.

Another word for pack saddle bug