JargonFile/entries/WOMBAT.txt

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2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
WOMBAT
2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
/wombat/ , adj. [acronym: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] Applied to
problems which are both profoundly uninteresting in themselves and unlikely
to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful
constructions such as wrestling with a wombat. See also crawling horror ,
SMOP. Also note the rather different usage as a metasyntactic variable in
Commonwealth Hackish. Users of the PDP-11 database program DATATRIEVE
adopted the wombat as their notional mascot; the program's help file
responded to HELP WOMBAT with factual information about Real World wombats.