foo foo rah

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jun 9, 2011, at 7:11 AM, Michael Sheehan wrote:

> One family I know uses "foo foo rah" to describe a raucous party,
> especially one in which many participants get drunk. Does this term have currency outside that one family?

oh my yes. OED3 (June 2000) has a "foofaraw" entry with a huge pile of spellings (indicating that the word spread primarily through speech) and a wonderful etymology:

 < French fanfaron, adjective ‘boastful’ (1668; 1609 as noun in sense ‘braggart’; cf. French regional fanfarou) and its etymon Spanish fanfarrón, adjective ‘ostentatious, vain, arrogant’ and noun ‘braggart, show-off’ (1555; 1514 as panfarrón), of imitative origin (cf. fanfare n.). Cf. earlier fanfaron n.

N. Amer. colloq.

 A. adj.

  U.S. regional (west.). Fussy, vain; (also) gaudy, tawdry. Now hist. and rare.
[cites from 1848 through 1984]

 B. n. orig. U.S. regional (west.).

1. Trinkets or gaudy apparel; (in later use also) frivolous trappings or accoutrements.
[cites from 1848 through 1995]

2. Ostentation. Also: fuss; commotion, uproar; = brouhaha n.
[cites from 1933 through 2004]

...

this entry is based in part on the DARE entry.  nice World Wide Words column on the word:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-foo1.htm

(it's in Huckleberry Finn)

arnold

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