foo

[Baker, John]

        According to the Smokey Stover website,
http://www.smokey-stover.com/history.html, "What's Foo? My uncle found
this word engraved on the bottom of a jade statue in San Francisco's
China town. The word Foo means Good-Luck."  I don't know what year the
strip started using the word, but I see it used in a strip from 1938,
http://www.smokey-stover.com/dopedope.html, presumably not the first
use; it was probably introduced shortly after the strip started in 1935.


John Baker



-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Arnold M. Zwicky
Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 1:29 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: foo

in my Griffwords posting to Language Log, i quoted the Smokey Stover
wikipedia page:

"Foo" was one of these recurring nonsense words and was taken up by
World War II's "Foo Fighters". Foo may have been inspired by the French
word for fire, feu, but Holman never gave a straight answer as to the
origin.

-----

now a reader asks about foo:

Not sure if there's a historical/etymological connection, but if foo
postdates fubar (military acronym for fucked up beyond all recognition,
later adopted as the standard tokens for user-supplied arguments early
in the literature of symbolic programming languages as foo and bar),
that might be a likelier source than the French feu, etc.

-----

anybody have information on the history here?

arnold

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