[WOMBAT]

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WOMBAT /wom'bat/ adj.

[acronym: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] Applied to problems which are both profoundly [uninteresting] in themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful constructions such as `wrestling with a wombat'. See also [crawling horror], [SMOP]. Also note the rather different usage as a metasyntactic variable in [Commonwealth Hackish].

Users of the PDP-11 database program DATATRIEVE adopted the wombat as their notional mascot; the program's help file responded to "HELP WOMBAT" with factual information about Real World wombats.