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, corge, grault,
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'), 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 popular in the
1930s, which frequently included the word "foo". 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". 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 may have
been 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"). 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) but with their origins rapidly
forgotten.
One place they are 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). Informants
connected the term to the Smokey Stover strip.
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, only then 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.
Node:foobar, Next:fool, Previous:foo,
Up:= F =
foobar n.
[very common] Another widely used metasyntactic variable; see
foo for etymology. Probably originally
propagated through DECsystem manuals by Digital Equipment
Corporation (DEC) in 1960s and early
1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers do
not generally use this to mean FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense. See
also Fred Foobar. In RFC1639,
"FOOBAR" was made an abbreviation for "FTP Operation Over Big
Address Records", but this was an obvious backronym.
Node:fool, Next:fool file, Previous:foobar, Up:= F
=
fool n.
As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who
habitually reasons from obviously or demonstrably incorrect
premises and cannot be persuaded by evidence to do otherwise; it
is not generally used in its other senses, i.e., to describe a
person with a native incapacity to reason correctly, or a clown.
Indeed, in hackish experience many fools are capable of reasoning
all too effectively in executing their errors. See also cretin, loser,
fool file.
The Algol 68-R compiler used to initialize its storage to the
character string "F00LF00LF00LF00L..." because as a pointer or as
a floating point number it caused a crash, and as an integer or a
character string it was very recognizable in a dump. Sadly, one
day a very senior professor at Nottingham University wrote a
program that called him a fool. He proceeded to demonstrate the
correctness of this assertion by lobbying the university (not
quite successfully) to forbid the use of Algol on its computers.
See also DEADBEEF.