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

glarked from context. Compare blurgle.

5. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism used to suggest that further

discussion would be fruitless.

(1997-03-27)