USAGE: equobity (was: Re: USAGE: names for pillbug/wood louse/woodbug

John C:
> And Rosta scripsit:
>
> > igkhwob "a specific but randomly-chosen illustrative example,
> >         serving the communicative function of a bound variable
> >         in some hypothetical proposition" [WHAT?!]
>
> So this is the word for metasyntactic variables such as "foo" and
> "John Doe"?
I was going to say "your guess is as good as mine", but thinking
more carefully about it, I think that igkhwobs have to be specific,
so not "foo" and "John Doe" but, say, "John Cowan" -- indeed that
example is itself an igkhwob: English uses "say" as an igkhwobity
marker (perhaps it ought to be spelt "equobity" in English). The
essence of equobity is that you make the example more specific
in order to make it easier to imagine. So instead of saying
"suppose someone does something incredibly unexpected", you have
the equob "suppose John Cowan joins the campaign to reelect Bush".

--And.