Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mstan!amull
From: amull@Morgan.COM (Andrew P. Mullhaupt)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "foo" origin
Summary: Check WWII first.
Message-ID: <564@s5.Morgan.COM>
Date: 3 Dec 89 07:15:26 GMT
References: <3147@ibmpa.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Morgan Stanley & Co. NY, NY
Lines: 27

In article <3147@ibmpa.UUCP>, lmb@ghoti.uucp (Larry Breed) writes:
> "foo" and "bar" were in use around Harvard and MIT in 1960.  John McCarthy's
> Lisp project moved to Stanford in 1961 or 1962 and began to disseminate
> "foo" usage on the west coast.  Perhaps some good Cambridge graybeard
> can tell us the history before 1960.
> 

Most slang of this kind originates in the military. FUBAR and SNAFU
are acronyms for (in polite usage) "Fouled Up Beyond All Repair"
and "Situation Normal, All Fouled Up". SNAFU came before FUBAR,
which seems natural. Both were in widespread use in the United
States Armed Forces during World War II. It is possible that these
terms predate this war, but I don't know how authoritative you can
expect to get. The best reference is the new Dictionary of American
and Regional English, which supersedes Eric Partridge's famous
Slang Dictionary. D.A.R.E. is published in installments, (like OED)
and I don't know that all the volumes are out, so you might look it up 
in Partridge. 

Also: "Bug" is actually due to computing, and there was an actual
moth at Harvard. Clooge, (the original spelling of what has now been
corrupted to kludge - now rhyming with fudge) was around in Viet Nam,
but again I don't know how far back it goes.


Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt