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Comment by kubiiii | Hacker News Reader

In France we use toto and tata. At least it's easier to see those words as examples. As a teenaegr, learning some languages, I thought using foo & bar was mandatory. Very confusing.

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"toto" and "tata" may well be easier for you, but I find it easier to see "foo" and "bar" as examples. The point is that no word will be universally seen as an example without meaning, so documents like the one in the link are necessary.

Comments like "xyz is easier" forget that we aren't all the same.

It is easier for you now that you know that they are examples. The syllabe repetition in toto and tata make it a little more obvious I think. But you are right we aren't all the same, which was the point of my initial post. Then I managed to pretend we are superior :)

But Toto is the name of a band and Tata the name of an industrial complex that produces, among other things, cars.

Toto is a fictional dog. Tata is a now famous football manager.

Foobar applies to most of my code.

In Chinese, repeated syllables are very common in everyday speech, so they might think that tata and toto were abbreviations of something significant.

example: 胖胖 (pàng pàng) "fat fat," nickname for a fat child in the class (generally considered a compliment.)

Chinese speakers are also (according to my teacher) very fond of the English "Bye Bye" for goodbye, since it follows the same pattern, and will use it in place of 再见 (zài jiàn) "again see" if they know you will understand it.

English also uses mama (mother), papa (father), ta-ta (goodbye).

Amusingly, Polish uses pa for goodbye (not infrequently doubled up) and tata for father.

Fun to see a local variants. In Japan, "hoge" and sometimes "hogehoge" are often used.

Interesting, there are several international variations listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable#Words_co...

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