[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.
