foo

[V13]

On Tuesday 10 June 2003 19:09, George Daflidis-Kotsis wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 05:51:17PM +0300, Giannakis Eleftherios wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 03:42:42PM +0000, Papadogiannakis Vagelis wrote:
> > > exeite katantisei fubar
> >
> > Ti shmainei auto?
>
> fubr : F*ck3d Up Beyond Recognition. Proferetai "foobar"

fubar: F*** up beyond _all_ recognition... 

... kai den einai to idio me to "foo bar"

Apo to foldoc:

=========
FUBAR

 1. (WWII military slang) Fucked up beyond all recognition (or repair). 

See foobar. 

2. <hardware> The Failed UniBus Address Register in a VAX. A good example of 
how jargon can occasionally be snuck past the suits. 

Larry Robinson <lrobins at indiana.edu> reports the following nonstandard use for 
FUBAR: 

One day somebody got mad at the card reader (or card eater that day) on our 
Univac 3200. He taped a sign, "This thing is FUBAR", on the metal weight that 
sits on the stack of unread cards. The sign stayed there for over a year. One 
day, somebody said, "Don't forget to put the fubar on top of the stack". It 
stuck! We called that weight the fubar until they took away the machine. The 
replacement card reader had two spring loaded card clamps, one for the feed 
and one for the return, and we called THOSE fubars until we dumped punch 
cards. 

Incidently, the way he taped the sign on the weight made up for the lack of a 
little nylon piece that was missing from it, and fixed the card reader. 
That's why the sign stayed there. 
=========

=========
foobar

 Another common metasyntactic variable; see foo. Hackers do *not* generally 
use this to mean FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense. 
=========

=========
foo

 <jargon> /foo/ A sample name for absolutely anything, especially programs and 
files (especially scratch files). 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 "foo" is obscure. When used in connection with "bar" it is 
generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR, later bowdlerised 
to foobar. 

However, the use of the word "foo" itself has more complicated antecedents, 
including a long history in comic strips and cartoons. 

"FOO" often appeared in the "Smokey Stover" comic strip by Bill Holman. This 
surrealist strip about a fireman appeared in various American comics 
including "Everybody's" between about 1930 and 1952. FOO was often included 
on licence plates of cars and in nonsense sayings in the background of some 
frames such as "He who foos last foos best" or "Many smoke but foo men chew". 

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"). 

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 became the MIT AI LAB was involved with TMRC, and probably picked the 
word up there. 

Another correspondant cites the nautical construction "foo-foo" (or 
"poo-poo"), used to refer to something effeminate or some technical thing 
whose name has been forgotten, e.g. "foo-foo box", "foo-foo valve". This was 
common on ships by the early nineteenth century. 

Very probably, hackish "foo" had no single origin and derives through all 
these channels from Yiddish "feh" and/or English "fooey". 
=========

kai:

=========
metasyntactic variable

 <grammar> Strictly, a variable used in metasyntax, but often used for any 
name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under 
discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The 
word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, 
hardly ever) use "foo" or other words like it as permanent names for 
anything. 

In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a 
metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at any 
time. 

To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a 
cultural signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of 
variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures: 

foo, bar, baz, quux, quuux, quuuux...: MIT/Stanford usage, now found 
everywhere. At MIT (but not at Stanford), baz dropped out of use for a while 
in the 1970s and '80s. A common recent mutation of this sequence inserts qux 
before quux. 

bazola, ztesch: Stanford (from mid-'70s on). 

foo, bar, thud, grunt: This series was popular at CMU. Other CMU-associated 
variables include ack, barf, foo, and gorp. 

foo, bar, fum: This series is reported to be common at Xerox PARC. 

fred, barney: See the entry for fred. These tend to be Britishisms. 

toto, titi, tata, tutu: Standard series of metasyntactic variables among 
francophones. 

corge, grault, flarp: Popular at Rutgers University and among GOSMACS hackers. 

zxc, spqr, wombat: Cambridge University (England). 

shme: Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/. 

foo, bar, zot: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. 

blarg, wibble: New Zealand 

Of all these, only "foo" and "bar" are universal (and baz nearly so). The 
compounds foobar and "foobaz" also enjoy very wide currency. 

Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and mumble, for 
example. 

See also Commonwealth Hackish for discussion of numerous metasyntactic 
variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth. 

(1995-11-13) 
 =========

<<V13>>