OT: FooBar (was Bad Factor)

[Alex Rice]

On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 02:10  PM, Gary Rathbone wrote:
> When I was a student (a good few years ago) I was told the term 
> originated
> from the military, just as we us 'Snafu' now.
> Basically, it’s a distorted version of 'F***ed Up Beyound All 
> Recognition' -
> or am I just being naïve ?

Correct, but it's more interesting than that. The metasyntactic "foo" 
was adopted into the "fubar" phase as "foobar". But foo is the real 
interesting character of the bunch. The Jargon File has a lengthy and 
interesting entymology of foo.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/


Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at ARCplanning.com
alrice at swcp.com