A new word?

[Wilson Gray]

Whoa! I'd forgotten about Joe Bob, TV's favorite good ole boy. He's
been off free cable, here, for about fiften years, though I have seen
him in a C movie or two, since then.

As it happens, I did hear of kung-fu before the advent of the TV show.
What I heard was this. A kung-fu adept kung-fu chops a large box of
Kleenex. As far as any observer can tell, the box of Kleenex has
suffered no harm whatsoever. However, if you pull out the Kleenex in
the normal manner, when you get down to the bottom inch or so, you
will discover that the remaining Kleeneces have been reduced to
powder.

Because this tale was told to me by a Chinese-American friend of one
of my brothers and, since I had never before heard of K-F, I kinda
believed it. In fact, I kinda believe it to this very day. As far as I
know, no one has ever shown that a   K-F master couldn't do this. :-)

-Wilson

On 8/15/06, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject:      Re: A new word?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Dave Wilton
> Subject: Re: A new word?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
> >
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--
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

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org