waldo

waldo /wol'doh/ n.  [From Robert A. Heinlein's story
   "Waldo"] 1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm,
   controlled by a human limb.  When these were developed for the
   nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after the
   invention described by Heinlein in the story, which he wrote in
   1942.  Now known by the more generic term `telefactoring', this
   technology is of intense interest to NASA for tasks like space
   station maintenance.  2. At Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham
   and students), this is used instead of {foobar} as a
   metasyntactic variable and general nonsense word.  See {foo},
   {bar}, {foobar}, {quux}.