Ahouxf.124 net.general utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!duke!chico!harpo!npois!houxi!houxf!rosin Thu Feb 11 12:52:33 1982 Re: what's foobar? alice!rhm is unecessarily discreet in my opinion when presenting the derivation of foobar. During the Second World War (yes, a few of us are old enough to remember it well!) fubar (pronounced"foobar") was coined as a euphemismfor "fouled up beyond all recognition", where "fouled" is indeed a euphemism for yet another word. Fubar is closely related to another term - snafu - which, I think predated fubar. snafu means "situation normal, all fouled up" again allowing substitution for "fouled". ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.