Placeholder name
Placeholder names are intentionally overly generic and ambiguous terms referring to things, places, or people, the names of which or of whom do not actually exist; are temporarily forgotten, or are unimportant; or in order to avoid stigmatization, or because they are unknowable or unpredictable given the context of their discussion; to de-emphasize in which event the precise specification thereof is otherwise impossible, or to deliberately expunge.[1]
"Nicknack" redirects here. For the James Bond character, see The Man with the Golden Gun (film).Placeholder names for people are often terms referring to an average person or a predicted persona of a typical user.
Linguistic role[edit]
These placeholders typically function grammatically as nouns and can be used for people (e.g. John Doe, Jane Doe), objects (e.g. widget), locations ("Main Street"), or places (e.g. Anytown, USA). They share a property with pronouns because their referents must be supplied by context; but, unlike a pronoun, they may be used with no referent—the important part of the communication is not the thing nominally referred to by the placeholder, but the context in which the placeholder occurs.
In their Dictionary of American Slang (1960), Stuart Berg Flexner and Harold Wentworth use the term kadigan for placeholder words. They define "kadigan" as a synonym for thingamajig. The term may have originated with Willard R. Espy, though others, such as David Annis, also used it (or cadigans) in their writing. Its etymology is obscure—Flexner and Wentworth related it to the generic word gin for engine (as in the cotton gin). It may also relate to the Irish surname Cadigan.
Hypernyms (words for generic categories, such as "flower" for tulips and roses) may also be used in this function of a placeholder, but they are not considered to be kadigans.