foo
foo
(jargon)The etymology of "foo" is obscure. When used in connectionwith "bar" it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slangacronym FUBAR, later bowdlerised to foobar.
However, the use of the word "foo" itself has more complicatedantecedents, including a long history in comic strips andcartoons.
"FOO" often appeared in the "Smokey Stover" comic strip byBill Holman. This surrealist strip about a fireman appearedin various American comics including "Everybody's" betweenabout 1930 and 1952. FOO was often included on licence platesof cars and in nonsense sayings in the background of someframes such as "He who foos last foos best" or "Many smoke butfoo men chew".
Allegedly, "FOO" and "BAR" also occurred in Walt Kelly's"Pogo" strips. In the 1938 cartoon "The Daffy Doc", a veryearly version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE ISFOO!". Oddly, this seems to refer to some approving orpositive affirmative use of foo. It has been suggested thatthis might be related to the Chinese word "fu" (sometimestransliterated "foo"), which can mean "happiness" when spokenwith the proper tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking thesteps of many Chinese restaurants are properly called "fudogs").
Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility thathacker usage actually sprang from "FOO, Lampoons and Parody",the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, ajoint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though RobertCrumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the mostimportant and influential artists in underground comics, thisventure was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers laterburned most of the existing copies in disgust. The title FOOwas featured in large letters on the front cover. However,very few copies of this comic actually circulated, andstudents of Crumb's "oeuvre" have established that this titlewas a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics.
An old-time member reports that in the 1959 "Dictionary of theTMRC Language", compiled at TMRC there was an entry thatwent something like this:
FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANEPADME HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo countersturning.
For more about the legendary foo counters, see TMRC. Almostthe entire staff of what became the MIT AI LAB wasinvolved with TMRC, and probably picked the word up there.
Another correspondant cites the nautical construction"foo-foo" (or "poo-poo"), used to refer to somethingeffeminate or some technical thing whose name has beenforgotten, e.g. "foo-foo box", "foo-foo valve". This wascommon on ships by the early nineteenth century.
Very probably, hackish "foo" had no single origin and derivesthrough all these channels from Yiddish "feh" and/or English"fooey".