Me thinks this is a largely cultural question. Throughout my personal experience as both an amature hacker and 'professional' programmer (a hacker who codes for a living :), the only most common word I have dealt with was -- *SURPRISE* *SURPRISE* -- 'foobar' or a few unimpressive variations of this.
I don't know if this is a problem with me (lacking that spirit of a rebel :), but I couldn't come up with any better alternative to a word that is on the one hand silly and purposeless, yet, on the other hand, very much useful in fitting voids for which my poor brain finds it hard to find any 'descriptive' alternative. Yes, I should admit that for the most part the word 'foobar' makes my day. I'd use it in virtually any script, database table, shell command, tutorial, documentation that I write. It is also pretty common in many books/articles on programming that I have read. On top of this, it seems as though my lack of imagination it has become an indispensible word for me. ;/?
At one point, I did try to find an alternative word or a phrase in order to break the 'taboo' (yes, one might use the word to describe a 'thing' strongly imposed by the mainstream culture etc). Unfortunately, I couldn't get used to such things as 'test' or 'asdf', no matter how much I'd tried, heh ;)
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