Meaningless/Placeholder Verb?

In some fields of study, there are various placeholder nouns/proper nouns---basically nouns that are conventionally used in an example but are understood not to correspond to an actual object.

In economics examples you frequently see 'widgets'.

In law you have 'John Doe' or 'Blackacre'.

In computer science you see 'foo' and 'bar' used as variable names.

Is there, in any field of study, a verb that fulfills the same role? That is, a verb that does not actually correspond to an action, and is conventionally understood to be some sort of placeholder? I can vaguely remember encountering such a verb in the past---something that ended in -ulate or -ize, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was.

Solution 1:

I'm not sure how common it is these days, but when I was in college 30-35 years ago the popular placeholder verb was to frob; if you wanted to sound more sophisticated, the longer version to frobnicate could be used.

This word also did double duty as a noun, being used similarly to widget.

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