Lecture
An exemplificant (exemplificative) is a concrete concept or proper name used as an example to designate an unknown place, object, or person.
An exemplificant (from Medieval Latin exemplificare — «to illustrate, to serve as an example») is a word, phrase, or proper name used as an example to denote an unknown object, person, or place, or time, or to denote them in a generalization, or when specification is unnecessary/undesirable/impossible.
Exemplificants can be used either to indicate the conventionality and arbitrariness of the object of a narrative («the town of N»), or to emphasize the ordinariness, the everydayness of what is designated (for example, to emphasize the provinciality, the backwater character of a town — Uryupinsk). In different contexts this function may be performed by one and the same exemplificant or exemplificative formula (for example: «Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov»).
«Ace» and «Acme» were popular in company names as positioning words in alphabetical directories. It has been claimed that this is an acronym, either for «A Company that Makes Everything», «American Companies Manufacture Everything», or «American Company that Manufactures Everything». («Acme» is an ordinary English word from the Ancient Greek ἀκμή, where akme means the summit, the highest point, the edge, or the peak, and is therefore sometimes used to mean «the best».) A well-known example of the use of «Acme» as a placeholder name is the Acme Corporation, whose products often appear in the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons.
"«Joe's Diner» is a conventional name for a fictional or hypothetical restaurant for an ordinary person. Although franchises using this name do exist, its rhetorical use is often employed to describe a small local business as opposed to large enterprises or franchises. The phrase «Eat at Joe's» is a supplementary fictional or hypothetical typical advertisement for such an establishment, and has itself become a kind of snowclone in the form of «X at Joe's», «Eat at Y», or simply «X at Y». It has also been noted that ««Joe's Diner» is an example of a weak trademark, which would likely not succeed in a lawsuit against another «Joe's Diner» in another state» for trademark infringement. The corresponding expression «Eat at Joe's» was a frequently used joke in Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons in the 1940s, typically used when an image of a neon sign or other elaborate tubing appeared. Real-world examples include Sloppy Joe's, an actual restaurant in Key West, Florida; Joe's Crab Shack, an American seafood restaurant chain that often uses the phrase "Eat at Joe's" for its establishments; and Eskimo Joe's, an actual restaurant in Stillwater, Oklahoma, which has also used this phrase.
Placeholder names are widely used in computing. Foo and bar are commonly used as placeholders for file names, functions, and variables.
Certain domain names in the format example.tld (for example, example.com, example.net, and example.org) are officially reserved as placeholders for presentation purposes. The term «test user» is also used as a placeholder name during software testing.
In particular, Anytown, USA, is one of many placeholder names used in American colloquial speech to describe a stereotypical small American town.
The word «podunk» in American English is used to denote a hypothetical small town that is generally considered dull or insignificant, a place in the US that hardly anyone has heard of. Another example is «East Cupcake», denoting a typical small Midwestern town.
In New Zealand English, Woop Woops (or, alternatively, Wop-wops) is a (usually humorous) name for a remote place, typically rural and sparsely populated. A similar Australian English expression, Woop Woop (or, less commonly, Woop Woops), can refer to any remote place, town, or outback area. Another New Zealand English term with similar usage is Waikikamukau («Why kick a moo cow?»), a generic name for a small rural town.
Blackacre, Whiteacre, Greenacre, Brownacre, and their variants are placeholder names used for fictitious landholdings. These names are used by law professors in common-law jurisdictions, especially in the field of real property and sometimes in contracts, to discuss the rights of various parties to a parcel of land. If more than one holding is required to support a given proposition — for example, in connection with a boundary dispute, easements, or riparian rights — the second holding is usually called Whiteacre, the third Greenacre, and the fourth Brownacre.
Fnu Lnu is used by authorities to identify unknown suspects; the name is an abbreviation for «First Name Unknown, Last Name Unknown». If a person's first name is known but the surname is not, or vice versa, they may be referred to as [actual name] Lnu or Fnu [actual name], and an unidentified person may be called Fnu Lnu. For example, a former US Army interpreter was charged as «FNU LNU», and a mute man whose identity could not be established was arrested and charged with burglary in Harris County, Texas, under the name «FNU-LNU» (the charges were later dropped because the authorities were unable to contact the individual). Fnu-Lnu combinations may also be used when a person has only one name, as in Indonesian names. The name is considered a source of humor when Fnu Lnu is mistaken for a person's real name.
X ben X (literally «X, son of X», Arabic إكس بن إكس or سين بن سين) is used in Morocco by health and judicial authorities in cases where a person's identity cannot be established. Such cases include people with amnesia, suspects, patients, and the homeless. In 2009, 80,000 abandoned orphans bore the placeholder name X ben X, and every year in Morocco 100 unidentified bodies are buried under this status.
Placeholder names are used in written, publishing, and typographic work where there are gaps in a text, document, or data set for an unknown name. The proper name is usually inserted once the information becomes known.
In chemistry, preliminary or hypothetical elements are given temporary names until their existence is confirmed by IUPAC. Historically this temporary name followed Mendeleev's nomenclature; however, after the «transfermium wars» it came to be accepted that the systematic name of an element should be based on its atomic number.
In some hospitals, the names of elements from the periodic table are used as temporary designations for patients' names, for example, Francium Male. Hospitals also use temporary names for newborns.
Temporary names are often used in various sports for various reasons, usually connected with an ongoing branding process. Examples include the National Hockey League's Utah hockey club, which played its first season under this name while developing its permanent identity (eventually becoming the «Mammoth»); [36] the National Football League's Washington football team, which played two seasons under this name after abandoning the name «Redskins» because of a long-standing dispute over the name, and before introducing the «Commanders» brand; [37] and the Pacific Coast League's minor-league Oklahoma City baseball club, which played one season under this name after abandoning the name of its major-league affiliate, the «Dodgers», in favor of developing a more distinctive brand (eventually becoming the «Comets»).
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