I often find myself needing
families of nonsense words. A friend uses foo, boo, hoo, goo, etc. I tend to use fwoing, boing, going, doing, etc., or sometimes boink, doink, etc. I went through a bubbly phase -- gobble, bobble, obble, wibble, blibble. When really pressed for time, I often drop back to xx, xxx, yyy, or even a, b, x. When feeling creative, I'll try to think of random, unrelated English words: closet, ribbed, petunia, garlic, fish. ('fish' works surprisingly well.) I used to use Star Control II alien races: pkunk, spathi, utwig, supox, VUX. Once I tried using emotions -- hate, fear, happiness, joy, anger, loathing -- but they were too distracting.
I have also found that it is useful to have your own vocabulary of nonsense words, so you can recognize your stuff. If I find die if ++$fwoing > 42, I know somebody cut & paste my code. It's also good when running across random files littering a file system. It helps to know whether you're supposed to recognize what something is. If it's named foo, anybody could have created it, but if it's gronk, I know exactly whose it is (I only know one friend who uses that one.)
