[Dragaera] Distractions, unrelated, caused by poll answers

[Ken Koester]

Philip Hart wrote:

>
>Just for the record, these are (afaik anyway) just metasyntactic 
>variables, aka placeholders, in computer programming: 
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable
>

Yes and no.  They are, but their ultimate provenance is much older, I 
think:  the WWII (or even older, mid-30s, I seem to recall)-era "fubar" 
and "snafu", acronyms that were obscene in their original form. . . .

Snarkhunter