You may know him as John Doe or John Q. Public, however over here his name is Joe Bloggs. He has a brother, Fred Bloggs and together they fill the role of placeholder names in England and Australia - specifically in teaching programs.
I discovered this as I was reviewing training materials for our SAP project where I kept running into Joe as a fake employee. At first I didn't get it, but after seeing his name show up repeatedly, I started to understand what was going on. I asked a colleague of mine if there was any particular origin to the name Joe Bloggs, but she had no idea. Do you know the origin of John Doe? No? Neither do I.
When looking it up on Wikipedia I found that there were many examples of placeholder names. The world is full of them. The most infamous of them seems to be Jane Roe as in Roe v. Wade. Others include: Richard Roe, Jane Doe, Mary Major, Richard Miles, John Stiles, John Smith, Joe Blow, Joe Schmoe, Max Mustermann (Germany), Erika Mustermann (Germany), Felix Muster (Switzerland), Maria Bernasconi (Switzerland), Mario Rossi (Italy), Peder Ås (Norway), Kari Holm (Norway), Anna Malli (Finland - Anna Malli translates literally to "Anna the Model"; does this give further depth to the Incubus song?), Seán Ó Rudaí (Translates to Sean O'Something), Juan Perez (South America) and Medel Svensson (Sweden).
There are plenty more where that came from, but I don't have the patience to list them all; nor do I suspect you have the patience to read. I hope you enjoyed your short lesson on the many variants of placeholder names. Any favorites that I haven't listed?
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