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WOMBAT

Rating

WOMBAT /wom´bat/ 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.

The Jargon File

Cartoons

The crunchly saga

The infamous Crunchly cartoons by The Great Quux are woven into the lexicon, each next to an appropriate entry. To read them in the sequence in which they were written, chase pointers from here using the ‘next cartoon’ information in the captions.