This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,736 from Monday the 28th of November 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Mita's Intactic Words.
It is hosted by Clotu and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
This summary is law-blow-blow literally.
Hey everybody, this is Clotu.
I want to talk about metacentactic words.
Metacentactic words are words like Foo, Bar, Baz, Blah, things like that.
There are vocabels, there are sounds that we make to take the place of something specific.
And I realized when I was speaking at one point to someone, I realized that I used metacentactic
vocabels, words, whatever, fairly Austin.
And I kind of started to admire them for what part they played in kind of the linguistic
structure or relationship that I have with a lot of different people.
So this is sort of in praise of metacentactic words.
I think that it's a useful construct and I've got three different ways that they're useful.
And I mean, this isn't revolutionary.
These are the ways people use them, but I think it's interesting to categorize.
So first of all, they're useful in overviews because sometimes you want to explain a concept
or a process without distracting people with specifics.
You just want to describe a general process first so that the audience has expectation
of what they're about to get from you when you start delving into the specifics.
So for instance, you could imagine someone giving a little bit of a talk, such as.
The general and usual process is you type in some command, DNF install, blah, and then
start and enable the service system control in able dash dash now, blah.
So in that little speech there, the word blah, obviously takes the place of lots of different
things.
And that's the advantage of it.
That in that sequence of events, the install and then the starting of a service.
If you're a, if you're a cis admin or a frequent Linux user or whatever, then that's
a very familiar sequence.
And it does take time to get that sequence instilled in your brain.
You learn the install process maybe.
And then you forget that after you install, you have to start the service or maybe you've
got experience on one Linux distribution that auto starts things for you, whether you
want it to or not.
And then you go to a, maybe it arguably a more sensible distribution that doesn't do something
like that.
And you realize, oh, yeah, I have to start the service.
I have to do that.
So getting that sequence down is important.
And it doesn't matter what blah is in that scenario.
And the important information is DNF install, system cuddle, system control, enable
dash dash now or start if you prefer whatever the sequence is for you.
That's the important part.
And so you're alerting your listeners, hey, don't listen to blah, forget that part.
Think about this thing instead.
These commands, these specific things in this order.
That's what I want you to remember from this discussion.
Another way that they're useful is when you want to abstract something.
So you want to describe a specific thing to somebody.
And yet you don't want to insist on what that specific thing is.
I feel like this is more common than the examples I could think of.
I could only think of one example.
But I know I've done this before.
There's so a lot more than just in this exact case.
But the example I've got for that is blah install get cola or yeah, I guess I think I prefer
blah for that blah install get cola.
So what that's saying really is we're all friends here.
We know Linux, you know how to install an application.
It's probably either apt or DNF and then the word install and then get dash cola.
So the the important part here is the install get cola not the the fiddly part of what does
your distribution use to install a package caveat of course there are more package managers
than just apt and DNF.
I'm aware of that.
I'm just using that as a simple example for when you might want to abstract something.
I think it's based on your audience.
If you are speaking to an audience that knows a lot of different options and you just
want to convey hey we're going to use your network monitoring tool of choice in order
to get this result all we care about is the result.
So we don't care for using blah we don't care what we're using.
So I'll just say using blah network monitor we get a collection of this a dump of this
TCP traffic or you know whatever.
So abstraction and then finally sometimes you just need a placeholder text or phrase.
So when you can't think of a word so you just need you need something send an email to
you blah at example.com I mean this is kind of in a way a metacentactic to double
header because blah is a metacentactic in this in certainly and then example is in this
context of metacentactic because we know that example.com is a purposefully not it does exist
but a non-active a safe domain to use in well examples so this is kind of both but I mean
it could it could be whatever you know you could you could tell people to to type a phrase
but you don't you can't think of the phrase so you say blah blah blah blah it's a beautiful
technique now sometimes metacentactic words are not useful and I think it's important
not to get caught out when when using them and again it's entirely depending on your audience
and I think that's the fascinating thing about this is that that this is about a relationship
it's about who you're speaking with and what you can actually safely assume they are
comfortable with abstracting or or making into a variable so sometimes metacentactic words
I think can be distracting to certain people for instance let's say someone asks you
outright how do you install a patchy on this system oh you just type DNF install blah
wait a minute that that's only like half of the information that was asked for maybe
they knew the part that said DNF install maybe that was the part that they knew what
they were asking is what's the name of the Apache package on this system is it Apache
two is it HTT PD is it Apache two dash HTT PD like what do I type in and you've just
told them DNF install the part that they knew blah the part that they didn't know that's
not useful they can also be so that's distracting they can also be is that distracting
maybe that's not distracting maybe that's a wrong term maybe that is inappropriate or I guess
that is confusing as well so that's confusing I think sometimes they can be distracting as well
so if you are speaking to someone and you're throwing around metacentactic words and your
audience is not familiar with the concept of metacentactic words then you need to choose
your metacentactic words fairly carefully in my experience in the circles that I've
happened to have spoken to the word blah BLA H as beautiful as it is tends to be pretty
recognizable as nonsense word whereas word like the word foo and certainly bar and even
baths like that doesn't always go over as smoothly as I expect it to and I've kind of in a way
if I'm not sure of my audience I've kind of gotten away from a lot of foo bar baths I mean
that's not to say I don't use them because I use them all the time but if the audience is if I'm
not 100% comfortable with that audience's knowledge base then I do tend to find that I have
better success with blah or just the literal term example that that tends to work
better in in my experience I think sometimes throwing out a word that people don't
expect like foo bar baths but they just don't they don't they don't immediately understand
that that's a that's a word that they are meant to treat as a fake word as a placeholder
and and you can like certainly I mean that's that's sort of like catching people off guard
but it can also just deeply confuse someone who who who may kind of know that metacentactic
words existed and just aren't quite sure how far it goes and so if you're telling a new
Linux user for instance oh just type type of type in dnf install foo like sometimes that sounds
like a thing that they're supposed to type in like okay here I go dnf install f oh oh or f you
and then you're like oh no no I didn't mean literally type in the word foo I meant whatever you're
trying to type in you know like that it it falls apart then and again I in my experience which
is just my experience but in my experience blah seems to very rarely confuse people examples as
well but it's harder to say example when you're speaking I find like that just dnf install example
that's weird whereas in writing that does tend to come across I think okay so metacentactic words
they're really useful they're interesting little linguistic unique things no when to use them
and I think no when not to use them and then always I really kind of analyze for yourself
your audience who you're speaking to what's their comfort level with metacentactic words like
is that a concept that they understand if it is is there a specific set of words that they
would be familiar with or a specific set of words that would completely throw them for a loop it's
kind of an interesting exercise and I think if you if you give it a moment of thought and it
because it's not really it's not something that I generally think about before speaking to a group of
people I don't I don't sit down and look look their names up on on the internet and try to figure
out who they are and what kind of words they would be familiar with it's not like that it's just
kind of read the room you look at who you think you're talking to you you might be wrong because you're
just looking at a bunch of people but make some kind of assessment and then make make the call
based on what you believe to be true and then as you proceed if it turns out that yeah they do
actually seem to be pretty comfortable with this concept of abstracting words away from what I
actually mean well let's go a little bit further I'll just start using food and barren baths
and other weird terms like that until I get a blank stare and then I know I've gone to too far
I'll clarify and then I know my I can level set there you go that's my my thoughts on metacentactic
wording hopefully this was interesting to you thanks for listening talk to you next time you have been
listening to hacker public radio as hacker public radio does work today's show was contributed
by a HBR this night like yourself if you ever thought of a coin podcast click on our
contribute link to find out how easy it means hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an onsthost.com
internet archive and our synced of net on the satellite stages they show is released on their
creative comments attribution 4.0 international license