foo

/foo/ 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. [very common] 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 , garply , waldo , fred ,
plugh , xyzzy , thud. When foo is used in connection with bar it has
generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR ( Fucked Up Beyond
All Repair or Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition ), later modified to foobar.
Early versions of the Jargon File interpreted this change as a post-war
bowdlerization, but it it now seems more likely that FUBAR was itself a
derivative of foo perhaps influenced by German furchtbar (terrible) foobar
may actually have been the original form. For, it seems, the word foo itself
had an immediate prewar history in comic strips and cartoons. The earliest
documented uses were in the Smokey Stover comic strip published from about
1930 to about 1952. Bill Holman, the author of the strip, filled it with odd
jokes and personal contrivances, including other nonsense phrases such as
Notary Sojac and 1506 nix nix. The word foo frequently appeared on license
plates of cars, in nonsense sayings in the background of some frames (such
as He who foos last foos best or Many smoke but foo men chew ), and Holman
had Smokey say Where there's foo, there's fire. According to the Warner
Brothers Cartoon Companion Holman claimed to have found the word foo on the
bottom of a Chinese figurine. This is plausible; Chinese statuettes often
have apotropaic inscriptions, and this one was almost certainly the Mandarin
Chinese word fu (sometimes transliterated foo ), which can mean happiness or
prosperity when spoken with the rising tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking
the steps of many Chinese restaurants are properly called fu dogs ). English
speakers' reception of Holman's foo nonsense word was undoubtedly influenced
by Yiddish feh and English fooey and fool. Holman's strip featured a
firetruck called the Foomobile that rode on two wheels. The comic strip was
tremendously popular in the late 1930s, and legend has it that a
manufacturer in Indiana even produced an operable version of Holman's
Foomobile. According to the Encyclopedia of American Comics, Foo fever swept
the U.S., finding its way into popular songs and generating over 500 Foo
Clubs. The fad left foo references embedded in popular culture (including a
couple of appearances in Warner Brothers cartoons of 1938-39; notably in
Robert Clampett's Daffy Doc of 1938, in which a very early version of Daffy
Duck holds up a sign saying SILENCE IS FOO! ) When the fad faded, the origin
of foo was forgotten. One place foo is known to have remained live is in the
U.S. military during the WWII years. In 1944-45, the term foo fighters was
in use by radar operators 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). Because
informants connected the term directly to the Smokey Stover strip, the folk
etymology that connects it to French feu (fire) can be gently dismissed. The
U.S. and British militaries frequently swapped slang terms during the war
(see kluge and kludge for another important example) Period sources reported
that FOO became 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,
but this (like the contemporaneous FUBAR ) was probably a backronym. Forty
years later, Paul Dickson's excellent book Words (Dell, 1982, ISBN
0-440-52260-7) traced 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. 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. The Crumbs may also have been influenced by a short-lived
Canadian parody magazine named Foo published in 1951-52. 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. ) This definition used Bill Holman's nonsense word, then only two
decades old and demonstrably still live in popular culture and slang, to a
ha ha only serious analogy with esoteric Tibetan Buddhism. Today's hackers
would find it difficult to resist elaborating a joke like that, and it is
not likely 1959's were any less susceptible. Almost the entire staff of what
later became the MIT AI Lab was involved with TMRC, and the word spread from
there.
