A new word?

[Wilson Gray]

Probably the late '50's, Mark. I remember Smokey from the '40's. He
was around During The War.

Do you have any idea what the point of that strip was? I understood
nothing, though, clearly, the strip was memorable.

NOTARY SOJAC, not to mention 1506 NIX NIX.

-Wilson

On 8/17/06, Mark A. Mandel <mamandel at ldc.upenn.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: A new word?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Towse <my.cache at GMAIL.COM> writes:
> >>>
> The "foo" in code examples is a phonetic rendering of the FU in FUBAR
> which is not the "fu" in code-fu.
>
> On 8/15/06, Dave Wilton <dave at wilton.net> wrote:
> > 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.
> <<<
>
> But it's not the only source for "foo". I first learned the word from the
> comic strip Smokey Stover, in the late 50s or early 60s if I recall
> correctly. Programmerese might have already had "foo" < "FUBAR" by then, but
> I'd be quite dubious about its having spread beyond what was then still a
> small and highly esoteric subculture.
>
> -- Mark A. Mandel
> [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]
>
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