$Revision: 1.1 $
$Date: 2003-12-20 00:12:50 $

SAAJ FAQs

Q. What was the original reference to Wombats?

A. Not sure, here is one refencence from the Jargon lexicon

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.