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There are two sentences in Badass: Making Users Awesome:

Always close the floog cover before replacing the Y widget.

Well, because the Y widget interferes with the floog's op connector.

What does the floog mean? what is floog's op connector?

Nathan Tuggy
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Jodoo
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1 Answers1

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This is an example dialog between a technical support person and a (very dim) user. It is intended to demonstrate how to provide good technical support. The dialog is made-up, and the word floog is very made-up.

floog is an example of a placeholder name:

Placeholder names are words that can refer to objects or people whose names are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown in the context in which they are being discussed.

I suspect that op is also a placeholder name. Alternatively, given that it qualifies connector, it may be meant to sound a little like an abbreviation for output. Either way, its meaning is not relevant to the principles that the dialog is intended to demonstrate.

JavaLatte
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    The term that came to my mind was metasyntactic variable, which is basically a nonsense placeholder word that can be used to take on any role in a syntax as necessary. – stangdon Aug 09 '16 at 08:44
  • @stangdon, I considered that, but the variable in metasyntactic variable suggests that it's a computer science term. This wiki article is of the same opinion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable – JavaLatte Aug 09 '16 at 09:18
  • @JavaLatte Thanks for your careful explanation & answer. But what does "op" mean in that context? I guess it's over power. – Jodoo Aug 09 '16 at 17:02
  • @Jodoo, you are welcome. Sorry, I did no see the op part of your question: I have updated my answer to explain it. – JavaLatte Aug 09 '16 at 17:12
  • @JavaLatte Never mind, it's my fault. You are so awesome! :-) – Jodoo Aug 09 '16 at 17:39