This article argues that the English-language nonsense words “foo,” “bar,” “baz,” and others in a more or less standardized sequence of so-called metasyntactic variables commonly used in computer programming ought to be understood as meta-abstractive, re-representing a linguistically derived code’s abstraction of language and the abstraction of the programming language hierarchy itself, making it legible in a manner that rewards culturally oriented study: for example, of programming as a culture and of cultures of software development or engineering.

This article argues that the English-language nonsense words “foo,” “bar,” “baz,” and others in a more or less standardized sequence of so-called metasyntactic variables commonly used in computer programming ought to be understood as meta-abstractive, re-representing a linguistically derived code’s abstraction of language and the abstraction of the programming language hierarchy itself, making it legible in a manner that rewards culturally oriented study: for example, of programming as a culture and of cultures of software development or engineering.

This article argues that the English-language nonsense words “foo,” “bar,” “baz,” and others in a more or less standardized sequence of so-called metasyntactic variables commonly used in computer programming ought to be understood as meta-abstractive, re-representing a linguistically derived code’s abstraction of language and the abstraction of the programming language hierarchy itself, making it legible in a manner that rewards culturally oriented study: for example, of programming as a culture and of cultures of software development or engineering.

This article argues that the English-language nonsense words “foo,” “bar,” “baz,” and others in a more or less standardized sequence of so-called metasyntactic variables commonly used in computer programming ought to be understood as meta-abstractive, re-representing a linguistically derived code’s abstraction of language and the abstraction of the programming language hierarchy itself, making it legible in a manner that rewards culturally oriented study: for example, of programming as a culture and of cultures of software development or engineering.

This article proposes for the figure or cipher of “essayism” three critical homologies: (a) as a name for the effect or intensity of “theory” in US literary-critical and scholarly research practice; (b) as the object of a sometimes sincere and sometimes malicious mourning, in pronouncements of theory’s death; (c) as a mark of the indiscipline of “creative writing,” understood as a space into which English studies and US literary studies have diverted the disruptively writerly energies of imported Continental thought.