In english, the variables foo and bar are very often used for simple examples, or for anonymous variables (see these three posts for more on these metasyntactic variables (1), (2), (3))
Usually, I often use titi, toto and huhu and it seems that I am not the only french guy to use them.
So, they should be different in german, spanish, chineese or whatever language...
And you, depending on your mother tongue, which variable names do you use (other than bar and foo, of course) in that case (I mean for anonymous variables, since we all know that we shouldn't use them in real program) ?
"thingy" and "thangy" have been showing up in my code over the last six months. no idea how that started. mother-tongue = English.
[below added 24 hours after above]
Hunh. "thingy" shows up in Wictionary:Metasyntactic words (links to Wictionary:thingy) and briefly in Wikipedia:Metasyntactic_variable. And, of course, THIS page now shows up in the top-10 google hits for "metasyntactic thingy." (I'm just making it worse, aren't I?)
I use it most commonly as a throw-away buffer-name in Emacs