Keith Devens .com

Well, 'spam' and 'eggs', of course, if you're using Python, that is. Other than that, let me quote Tim Peters:

Indeed, when I design my killer language, the identifiers "foo" and "bar" will be reserved words, never used, and not even mentioned in the reference manual. Any program using one will simply dump core without comment. multitudes will rejoice. -- Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998

(From: http://starship.python.net/crew/mwh/quotes.html)

Haha... I love that quote! As for words I use in my code...

w, x, y, z, i, j, k
fuck, shit, cunt, ass, asshole, dick, dickhead, bitch, biatch, slut, slutbucket, whore, piss, motherfucker

...and a few that make the ones listed above look like they belong in a children's novel.

Incidentally, I wrote an encryption algorithm that I've used in various forms in my code, for web scripting, contract labor, and once or twice for actual work, called BitchWhore.

blah and blech.

I had a friend at Caltech who would name his Maple (symbolic math program) arrays, variables and functions with words like M. Bean describes above. Naturally, he would go back and rename them before turning it in.

Maple is some good stuff, slow, but a great tool.

Actually, because I so commonly did this throughout my academic career, I wrote a program in Perl that would run through my source files and automatically rename the above listed variables to something a bit more kosher.