Bingle

I think I first heard this word in a cat meme or something. It’s a nice round six-letter word; it sounds fun and is easy to type. Phonetically, there are no long vowels, giving it a bit of a casual vibe, and ending with the syllabic /l/ moves it into playful territory.

When programming, I often need a placeholder word, e.g., if I haven’t decided what to name a variable yet, or I need to print out a recognizable string for debugging, but it doesn’t matter what. I used to use whatever word first popped into my head for this purpose, or even just random keyboard mashing. I recall one time during a code review a co-worker caught a debugging statement of mine that just printed out the word “Gamecube”.

Over the last few years, I gradually converged on bingle as my go-to placeholder word whenever I don’t know what to name something. On top of its nice phonetic qualities (which I find valuable even if I’m just reading a word in my head), it’s really easy to type on a standard keyboard layout. I have it so worked into my muscle memory at this point that I can just kind of let my hands fall on the keyboard and I’ll type it.

Apparently “Mister Bingle” is a snowman character specific to New Orleans Christmas. There’s a way cooler picture of him on the linked page

When I was deciding what to post about today, I opened up my text editor and started copying over the HTML for a new post, as usual. When it came time to replace the path to yesterday’s with one for today’s, I found my fingers reflexively reaching for a nice, comfy bingle.

Normally, bingle is ephemeral for me, quickly removed or replaced with some actual content. So I thought, just for today, why don’t I let bingle itself, my nonsense word, actually be the content?

This made me curious if bingle truly is just a nonsense word or not, so I did a quick Wiktionary search. Apparently, it really is a word with a handful of niche meanings! It’s a hairstyle, a baseball term, and best of all, it’s used to mean a minor crash (like a fender bender) in Australia. The idea of getting in a vehicular collision and saying “oh no, I’ve had a bingle” is so funny to me. What a world.

Do you have a go-to word, when programming, typing, or writing? Is it nonsense or does it have a meaning? How did you settle upon it? Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club.