A new word?

[Jonathan Lighter]

I first encountered this kind of "-fu" twenty years ago in Joe Bob Briggs's _Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In_. He may have used it in the present sense of "abilities," but I recall it for certain only in contexts of fighting, at least at first. "Bimbo-fu" thus referred to any kind of on-screen B-movie violence perpetrated by bimbos. "Vampire-fu," by vampires.

  Whippersnappers will be fascinated to know that before the ABC-TV series of 1972-75, few Americans other than specialists had ever heard of "kung fu."

  JL

Dave Wilton <dave at WILTON.NET> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Dave Wilton
Subject: Re: A new word?
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This one is additionally interesting because "foo" is commonly used in
software code examples to stand for a username, password, file name, or
other variable character string. When I first read Wilson's post, I thought
it was an alternate spelling of this.

--Dave Wilton
dave at wilton.net


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Grant Barrett
Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2006 1:38 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: A new word?

I did an entry for the suffix "fu" in 2004. I probably need to revise
it to include many more examples.

http://www.dtww.org/index.php/dictionary/fu/

Grant Barrett
gbarrett at worldnewyork.org
http://www.doubletongued.org/

The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (May 2006, McGraw-Hill)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071458042/


On Aug 15, 2006, at 16:26, Wilson Gray wrote:

>> From Slashdot:
>
> If you've got what it takes [to write good code], and more of it than
> anyone else, then you can take home up to $10k for your _code-fu_."
>
> ca.98,000 raw Googlits.
>
> -Wilson
> --
> Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have
> found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be
> imposed upon them.
>
> Frederick Douglass
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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