Beyond Tiki, Bilge, and Test / Bilge / don't want no foo-foo haircut...
Post #161897 by Johnny Dollar on Fri, May 27, 2005 3:59 AM
JD
Johnny Dollar
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Fri, May 27, 2005 3:59 AM
the meaning of foo per "the staight dope" definition of foo from "the new hacker's dictionary"
The etymology of hackish However, the use of the word Paul Dickson's excellent book "Words" (Dell, 1982, ISBN 0-440-52260-7) traces "Foo" to an unspecified British naval magazine in 1946, quoting as follows: "Mr. Foo is a mysterious Second World War product, gifted with bitter omniscience and sarcasm." Other sources confirm that Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker usage actually sprang from "FOO, Lampoons and Parody", the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most important and influential artists in underground comics, this venture was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later burned most of the existing copies in disgust. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. However, very few copies of this comic actually circulated, and students of Crumb's `oeuvre' have established that this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics. An old-time member reports that in the 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC Language", compiled at TMRC, there was an entry that went something like this: FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning. For more about the legendary foo counters, see TMRC. Almost the entire staff of what later became the MIT AI Lab was involved with TMRC, and probably picked the word up there. Very probably, hackish |