[Dragaera] Distractions, unrelated, caused by poll answers

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Ken Koester wrote:
> 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. . . .
>   
There's an "obvious" connection there, but the jargon file argues that 
it may be the other way around -- "foo" may have come first, and turned 
into "foobar" under the influence of something, perhaps German 
"furchtbar" (terrible).   Foo appears in the mid 30s at least.

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/dd-b
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