mumble
1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to
enunciate, or the speaker has not thought it out. Often
prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to
get into a long discussion. "Don't you think that we could
improve LISP performance by using a hybrid reference-count
transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big enough and
there are some extra cache bits for the {microcode} to use?"
"Well, mumble ... I'll have to think about it."
2. Yet another {metasyntactic variable}, like {foo}.
3. Sometimes used in "public" contexts on-line as a
placefiller for things one is barred from giving details
about. For example, a poster with pre-released hardware in
his machine might say "Yup, my machine now has an extra 16M of
memory, thanks to the card I'm testing for Mumbleco."
4. A conversational wild card used to designate something one
doesn't want to bother spelling out, but which can be
{glark}ed from context. Compare {blurgle}.
5. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism used to suggest that further
discussion would be fruitless.
(1997-03-27)