Editing Placeholder name (section)

== Linguistic role ==
These [[Free variables and bound variables|placeholders]] typically function [[grammar|grammatically]] as [[noun]]s and can be used for people (e.g. ''[[John Doe|John Doe, Jane Doe]]''), objects (e.g. ''[[Widget (economics)|widget]]''), locations ("Main Street"), or places (e.g. ''Anytown, USA''). They share a property with [[pronoun]]s because their [[reference|referents]] must be supplied by context; but, unlike a pronoun, they may be used with no referent—the important part of the communication is not the thing nominally referred to by the placeholder, but the context in which the placeholder occurs.

In their ''Dictionary of American Slang'' (1960), [[Stuart Berg Flexner]] and Harold Wentworth use the term ''kadigan'' for placeholder words. They define "kadigan" as a synonym for ''thingamajig''. The term may have originated with [[Willard R. Espy]], though others, such as David Annis, also used it (or '''''cadigans''''') in their writing. Its [[etymology]] is obscure—Flexner and Wentworth related it to the generic word ''gin'' for [[engine]] (as in the ''[[cotton gin]]''). It may also relate to the [[Ireland|Irish]] [[surname]] ''Cadigan''.