"Adult Swim"

[Jonathan Lighter]

The meaning of "Foo!" is that it used to appear regularly on signs stuck in
the ground or pinned or pasted randomly to walls in the comic strip "Smokey
Stover."  If you had to ask what it meant, of course, you'd never know. So,
like, later for you!

Bomber crews in Britain toward the end of WW2 referred to real and
hypothesized German jets and rocket planes as "foo fighters."  The term
also embraced what later would be called "unidentified flying objects,"
though they were presumed to be German, not Martian.

JL

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 3:18 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Adult Swim"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 8:35 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > "Boogie" was the only mucus-related term my grandmother used.
>
> "Booger" is the only term for that that I know. It also occurs in the
> name of the child-frightener, the "booger-man." It's even used on
> expressions like, "Damn, man! You's a *big* booger!" = "… larger than
> the average person." "Boogie" is only a musical term.
>
> As for "doobie" and "doober," they're both just literary terms to me.
> The Doobie Brothers had long since come and gone, years before I found
> out that "doobie" wasn't just random noise, like the _foo_ in
> "Foo-Fighters," but actually had a meaning. Unless "foo" also has a
> meaning.
>
> Youneverknow.
>
> There's an Adult Swim sketch in which Mr. T wants to join to join the
> band in its fight against what he supposedly hears as "fool." That
> would never happen, of course , because it was the "fool" [fu:l] and
> not the "foo" [fu] that was a problem for the brother.
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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