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A What-Do-You-Call-It question

English Language & Usage Asked by Elizabeth Shaw on August 8, 2021

In a book, there is this sentence:

“My mom would have put this in her What-Have-You-Done-Now? File, but it was SOS to me.”

-p 19, The SOS File, Betsy Byars.

Is there a name for this kind of hyphenated phrase-as-title? Thank you in advance!

One Answer

The generic name is placeholder name.

However, in computer science, the term is metasyntactic variable, and through the wide spread of modern "hacker" and computer cultures, metasyntactic variable has taken on the role of placeholder name in some corners of the Internet.

Answered by Nick2253 on August 8, 2021

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