Foo
Foo -- a dictionary excerpt
foo /foo/
1. /interj./ Term of disgust. 2. Used very generally as
a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files
(esp. scratch files). 3. First on the standard list of metasyntactic
variables used in syntax examples. See also bar, baz,
qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud.
The etymology of hackish `foo' is obscure. When used in connection
with `bar' it is generally traced to the WWII-era
Army slang acronym FUBAR (`Fucked Up Beyond All Repair'), later
bowdlerized to foobar. (See also FUBAR.)
However, the use of the word `foo' itself has more complicated
antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and
cartoons. The old "Smokey Stover" comic strips by Bill Holman often
included the word `FOO', in particular on license
plates of cars; allegedly, `FOO' and `BAR' also occurred in Walt Kelly's
"Pogo" strips. In the 1938 cartoon "The Daffy
Doc", a very early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying
"SILENCE IS FOO!"; oddly, this seems to refer to
some approving or positive affirmative use of foo. It has been suggested
that this might be related to the Chinese word
`fu' (sometimes transliterated `foo'), which can mean "happiness" when
spoken with the proper tone (the lion-dog
guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are properly
called "fu dogs").
Paul Dickson's excellent book "Words" (Dell, 1982, ISBN 0-440-52260-7)
traces "Foo" to an unspecified British naval
magazine in 1946, quoting as follows: "Mr. Foo is a mysterious Second
World War product, gifted with bitter
omniscience and sarcasm."
Other sources confirm that `FOO' was a semi-legendary subject of WWII
British-army graffiti more-or-less equivalent
to the American Kilroy. Where British troops went, the graffito "FOO was
here" or something similar showed up.
Several slang dictionaries aver that FOO probably came from Forward
Observation Officer. In this connection, the later
American military slang `foo fighters' is interesting; at least as far back
as the 1950s, radar operators used it for the kind
of mysterious or spurious trace that would later be called a UFO (the
older term resurfaced in popular American usage in
1995 via the name of one of the better grunge-rock bands).
Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker usage
actually sprang from "FOO, Lampoons and
Parody", the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint
project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though
Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most
important and influential artists in underground
comics, this venture was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later
burned most of the existing copies in disgust. The
title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. However, very
few copies of this comic actually circulated, and
students of Crumb's `oeuvre' have established that this title was a
reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics.
An old-time member reports that in the 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC
Language", compiled at TMRC, there was an
entry that went something like this:
FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE
PADME HUM." Our first obligation is to
keep the foo counters turning.
For more about the legendary foo counters, see TMRC. Almost the entire
staff of what later became the MIT AI Lab
was involved with TMRC, and probably picked the word up there.
Very probably, hackish `foo' had no single origin and derives through all
these channels from Yiddish `feh' and/or English
`fooey'.
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