[Ads-l] Fugazi

[Christopher Philippo]

There is a band by the name whose pronunciation does not rhyme with crazy.  The frontman talks about the name here, though the audio is poor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3vCGhP0Ggo  He indicates he had learned of the word in the book Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There, and the band liked the word as a name because its meaning wasn’t obvious and thus did not create specific expectations about what their band was like.  Most people did not seem to know what it meant: is that a Chinese motorcycle? Is that an Italian dessert?

Chris Cuomo may have assumed that the meaning fake could be looked up, though he is right with respect to at least Cassell's Dictionary of Slang 2nd Ed. and Wiktionary.

Wiktionary is somewhat useful in this case in that it provides three citations for people using it to mean fake.  The movies Donnie Brasco and The Wolf of Wall Street might be helping to popularize the (fake?) fake meaning.
http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=fugazi&oldid=29048272  There is a fair amount of speculation on the Wiktionary Talk page for the entry about the derivation of the fake meaning and possible origins in NYC Italian-American street slang: http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:fugazi&oldid=32331408  There is skepticism about the acronym, though if the acronyms given for SNAFU and FUBAR are not backronyms it seems reasonable the same could possibly be true of FUGAZI.
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