I suspect this is a type of metasyntactic variable, a word which stands in for an unknown word. I don't know why those examples were chosen, but more common metasyntactic variables in my idiolect are 'whatchamacallit', 'doodad', 'thingummy' etc.
I suspect this is a type of metasyntactic variable, a word which stands in for an unknown word. I don't know why those examples were chosen, but more common metasyntactic variables in my idiolect are 'whatchamacallit', 'doodad', 'thingummy' etc.